Spending deal done, though final action could slip past deadline

Since then, White House officials and House GOP leaders had been trading offers on an expanded border package. By late Monday they had whittled down their differences and were finalizing the measure, sources said.

“A few questions still to answer, but they seem to be home,” one person familiar with the talks said earlier in the day. “Have to figure out the runway needed to formally land the plane.”

Republicans had also been seeking more funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention capacity, and Democrats were pushing for more money for Transportation Security Administration pay raises.

All of the different priorities were putting pressure on negotiators to maintain a DHS spending ceiling that didn’t violate the topline fiscal 2024 deal Johnson brokered with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. There was some concern another one of the bills in the package would potentially have to give up some of its money in order to fulfill all the Homeland needs, which would pose its own set of problems.

The package includes the Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, Financial Services, Legislative Branch and State-Foreign Operations measures as well as Homeland Security. Biden signed final fiscal 2024 appropriations for the other six annual bills into law earlier this month.

Short-term lapse

Both parties spent the weekend carping at each other over who would be to blame if there was another partial shutdown.

But the reality is that a deal between the White House and Johnson is very likely to clear Congress and get to Biden’s desk; it just might take more time than anyone would like.

The experience of January 2018 is instructive. Congress let funding lapse at midnight on Jan. 20, 2018, with federal agencies spending the weekend and all day Monday in a shutdown.

Then-President Donald Trump signed a three-week stopgap measure into law late in the evening of Monday, Jan. 22, and the Office of Personnel Management gave federal workers the all-clear to report back to work Tuesday morning.

...continued

swipe to next page