Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Donald Trump are moving toward a seven-month stop-gap budget bill that would fund the government through the end of September.
Significantly, the Continuing Resolution (CR) will not contain any cuts that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) made. There's just no time in the current cycle to add them.
The CR will maintain the spending levels passed during the Biden administration until Oct. 1, 2025, when a new fiscal year begins. It also means that Trump and Elon Musk will avoid a bruising fight over the DOGE cuts while giving Trump wide latitude to slash spending on his own in defiance of Congress.
“I am working with the GREAT House Republicans on a Continuing Resolution to fund the Government until September to give us some needed time to work on our Agenda,” Trump wrote on social media on Wednesday. “Conservatives will love this Bill, because it sets us up to cut Taxes and Spending in Reconciliation, all while effectively FREEZING Spending this year.”
That statement might be mostly true. There are spending increases cooked into the bill from previous budgets, but any thought to increasing defense spending or border security spending will have to wait for reconciliation.
“It locks in programs that should be trimmed,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “It doesn’t give increases to agencies that need them, like the Department of Defense, and it’s based on the Biden budget. Why would we want to lock in the priorities of the Biden budget?”
Those priorities will be ancient history by the time Republicans get through with the reconciliation process.
One Democrat who has decided to support any extension of government funding is Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).
“I’m never going to be a part of any vote that shuts the government down," Fetterman told Politico.
“The fact that anyone on our side would even rattle those sabers, that’s bull***t,” Fetterman said. “To think I’m going to burn the village down to save it, that’s bonkers.”
Johnson and Trump still have a big selling job to do with other Republican members of Congress.
Whether Republicans in the House adopt that approach is an open question. Conservative lawmakers have traditionally refused to support stopgap measures because they extend current funding levels and lump all government funding into one bill, rather than the 12 stand-alone spending bills that Congress is supposed to pass.
Even after meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House on Wednesday, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee said he had not decided whether he could support such a measure.
Roughly a dozen other Senate Democrats declined in interviews this week to say explicitly they would vote against a shutdown-averting bill. Several lawmakers said they want to know for sure that this bill would be the only way to avoid a lapse in federal funding before committing to supporting it. They also said they want to see proof that Speaker Mike Johnson can actually get it through the House.
It's not at all clear that Johnson will be able to get the seven-month CR through the House. That's why some members are quietly fashioning alternatives.
“We’re real close to a deal,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), an Appropriations Committee member. “We should get that done.”
“My best guess right now is that the House will pass or attempt to pass a full-year CR,” Collins told reporters. About the possibility of a shorter CR, she added, “I do not think the House is interested in that.”
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