Senate leaders unveiled a short-term spending bill Sunday that would keep the federal government funded through Dec. 11, pushing any shutdown fight past November’s midterm elections and stripping out the White House’s request for $1 billion to build new “Trump-class” battleships.
The bill largely holds federal agency funding at current levels. The House already passed a similar measure, but without various add-ons the White House wanted. Senators spent recent days negotiating which of those requests would survive.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune called passing the bill his top priority before the chamber leaves for August recess. “We need to ensure that they do not face a third” shutdown, Thune said, referencing two record-breaking shutdowns over the past 10 months.
Congress is acting nearly two months ahead of the Sept. 30 fiscal year deadline, an unusually early move. Lawmakers typically wait until the final hours before a funding cliff to pass stopgap measures.
The early action buys time for House and Senate negotiators to hash out the dozen annual appropriations bills before the new deadline. That won’t be simple. Republicans want a major boost to defense spending while cutting non-defense programs. Trump has called for a 10 percent cut to non-defense spending and roughly a 44 percent increase for defense.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Chair of the Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) pushed to delay a Trump administration rule requiring political appointees at federal agencies to screen grant proposals against the president’s policy priorities before approval.
Collins said she fought for changes to the rule “citing its potential to politicize grants and harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research.” Murray said Republicans rejected killing the rule outright. “While Republicans rejected killing the proposed rule outright, I’m going to keep fighting to put a stop to it once and for all, and I will keep pressing my Republican colleagues to do exactly that,” Murray said.
The White House Office of Management and Budget has said the grant review policy is meant to improve accountability and ensure taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted or misused.
