Congressional leaders have agreed to a deal to keep the government open beyond the looming Sept. 30 deadline after a previous attempt to postpone the funding fight until spring 2025 and attach a Trump-backed citizenship verification bill failed.
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the legislation, also known as a Continuing Resolution (CR), early next week.
Here are a few articles that made it – and a few that didn’t.
Funding until December
The deal, announced Sunday afternoon, would secure the government’s funding through Dec. 20 and buy time to negotiate a funding agreement for the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year.
The period of about three months is the period preferred by Democrats and Republican defense hawks.
This came after a bill that provided for a six-month transition period, the timeframe demanded by the Conservatives. failed in the House of Representatives. Republicans who supported the longer-term stopgap measure hoped it would reduce the likelihood of a massive omnibus spending package at year-end and potentially give former President Trump more influence over fiscal 2025 funding should he recapture the White House in the fall.
However, House Republican aides said in a call with reporters before the bill was introduced that this concession did not mean Republicans had embraced the idea of an omnibus deal just before Christmas. They added that lawmakers would “likely have the same conversations” again later this year.
Funding the Secret Service
The bill provides additional funding for the Secret Service of $231 million following the alleged second assassination attempt on Trump.
The proposed funding for the Secret Service comes after acting director Ronald Rowe pushed for increased funding for the agency.
Rowe said Earlier this week The agency must “make sure we get the staff we have, and that requires that we have the resources to hire more people.”
But some Republicans have raised questions about how additional funding would support protect Trump in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Others have also pointed to the funding the agency has already received in recent years.
“They’re just not very effective right now. I find it hard to believe that they didn’t have enough money, given that we gave them more money than they asked for this fiscal year, and that they couldn’t redeploy their troops or whatever,” Republican Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters Thursday, adding that the issue at hand was “more about politics and making good use of the resources they have.”
House Republican leadership aides said the funds would be “limited to meeting their immediate campaign needs” as Trump and Vice President Harris head into the home stretch to Election Day. They also said there would be “a number of conditions” on the funds, including meeting congressional demands while committees, including the House task force formed to investigate the July assassination attempt on Trump, conduct oversight of the agency.
SAVE law
The bill introduced on Sunday excludes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, although Trump urged the party to work to pass the bill this month, even if it would mean a shutdown.
Supporters say the measure would ensure that only citizens can vote in federal elections, require states to require proof of citizenship to register voters, and purge noncitizens from voter rolls.
House conservatives joined Trump in pushing to attach the measure – which the House passed as a standalone bill earlier this year with unanimous Republican support – to the bill, but Republicans largely viewed it as an initial offering to gain an advantage in later negotiations with the Senate.
They acknowledged that the bill would never pass the Democratic-led Senate or President Biden. Critics of the bill say it is already a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and point out that this is an extremely uncommon case. The White House also argued that the bill would make it harder for eligible voters to register.
While Trump pushed for a shutdown in the absence of the law, most Republicans in the House say there is no desire to let the financing expire so close to an election.
Submarine financing
Funding for the Virginia-class submarine program, which was included in the previous GOP-backed plan, is missing from the fresh stopgap plan.
The previous plan called for the Defense Department to allocate about $2 billion for the program’s “shipbuilding and refitting,” but officials said Sunday that funding fell through after a “joint conversation” between the granting agency, defense officials and the Biden administration.
At the same time, the Democratic members of the Senate Budget Committee say in a Sectional breakdown The bill states that for the duration of the interim solution, this would also expand the ministry’s authority to provide funds for “military construction projects that first received funds in the 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 fiscal years.”
VA deficit
The bill also fails to address warnings from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that the agency faces a $12 billion deficit in fiscal year 2025, despite pressure from Democrats.
However, the 46-page bill includes a number of health care expansions for the VA. Among them are measures that the Appropriations Committee said would expand the VA’s authority to provide care to veterans with “war-related disabilities.” It would also expand authority for the Joint Department of Defense-Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Facility Demonstration Fund.
Appropriations Committee members also say the bill reallocates withdrawn funds that were set aside for major construction projects in fiscal year 2024 and were not “obligated” to be available in fiscal year 2025.
They also point to the inclusion of an expansion of authority “for the monthly support allowance for disabled veterans participating in Paralympic and Olympic sports programs.”
“The VA currently allocates $2,000,000 to operate the Paralympic and Olympic sports programs, an amount that has not been increased in over a decade,” the Democratic House Budget Committee members note, emphasizing that the bill “increases the appropriation to $2,500,000 for each fiscal year from 2024 to 2027.”
The step comes after the Congress passed a law last week to address a more pressing $3 billion deficit at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, as officials warned that benefit payments to veterans could be suspended next month unless Congress acts.
But lawmakers say there is more time to address the threat posed by the larger potential deficit, and Republicans also say more information from the agency on the budget gap is needed before Congress can take action amid increasing scrutiny over the VA’s budget management.
FEMA funding
The three-month stopgap excludes an additional $10 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster relief fund that was already included in the original six-month plan by House Republicans. However, it allows the agency to more quickly exploit the fund’s money for disaster relief over the roughly three-month period.
“We have collectively decided to address the disaster side without additional disaster funds because this will be a two-and-a-half month CR,” staff said Sunday, although they noted that the bill still includes disaster funds in the form of a “disaster relief fund within FEMA that will be replenished once the CR becomes law.”
The consultants said the amount was “more than sufficient for a period of two and a half months” and that “further discussions” would be held on the matter in the coming months.
Emily Brooks and Mychael Schnell contributed.
