Spending fight turns to stopgap as House GOP stumbles

House Republicans are turning their focus to a debate over whether to fund the government through December or into next year after their hopes of passing 12 full-year funding bills before the August recess collapsed.

With no one expecting the annual funding process to be complete by a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline, hard-line conservatives are advocating for a stopgap measure, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), that would run into March of next year in order to avoid being jammed with a massive spending package under a lame-duck president.

They want to avoid a December funding deadline that historically has teed up a massive omnibus spending bill negotiated by leaders in the House and Senate.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), a spending cardinal and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said he and other Republicans would prefer a CR “into next year,” calling the prospect of a trillion-dollar-plus omnibus a “danger.”

“If the Democrats want to negotiate in good faith in December, we could always negotiate something in good faith,” he added. “But I’d rather not see a December deadline.”

Conservatives confident of former President Trump’s chances of taking back the White House in November also hope a stopgap bill into next year would allow Trump to have more influence over how the government will be funded through fall 2025.

But other Republicans, including members of the House Appropriations Committee, have pushed back against the idea of a CR into next year, instead pressing for the current Congress to finish its funding work before the year’s end and avoid a repeat of the last funding cycle, when Congress had to pass multiple stopgaps and didn’t finish its work until March.

“The longer we prolong this and go into another calendar year, it just puts tremendous stress on so many agencies, and I think it’ll put an undue burden on the new president,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), a spending cardinal, told The Hill last week. 

Little more than two months separates Congress from a looming shutdown deadline, and both chambers have yet to pass their 12 annual government funding bills — let alone begin bicameral negotiations. That all but assures the need for a stopgap.

Still, asked Wednesday if a continuing resolution was inevitable, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) responded facetiously.

“Nothing’s inevitable in American politics, haven’t we all learned that now?” Johnson said, an apparent reference to President Biden recently dropping his reelection bid and former President Trump surviving an assassination attempt earlier in the month.

“We’re talking about all the options on the table, haven’t made a decision on it,” Johnson said. “We’re just going to hit a pause for a week and then get right back to it.”

The Democratic-led Senate has passed zero appropriations bills, and only began advancing its first batch of bills out of committee earlier this month. By contrast, the House Appropriations Committee, which crafts the lower chamber’s funding bills, has already approved all its funding bills — and the full House has cleared roughly half of the measures.

But the House’s funding push has been sputtering in recent weeks as concerns over spending increases and rifts over policies in areas such as reproductive rights that held up funding bills last year resurface. 

House GOP leaders canceled votes that were scheduled for next week after pulling three bills that were slated for votes this week from the floor.

That’s after 10 Republicans joined most Democrats in tanking their fiscal 2025 legislative branch bill earlier this month. The final tally caught Republicans off guard as the measure, by far the smallest of the 12 funding bills, drew opposition from the party’s right flank partly over its funding levels. 

It also forecast the party’s challenge of passing what some members considered its toughest bills remaining. On Tuesday night, House GOP leaders pulled a scheduled vote on an energy and water appropriations bill.

“I’ve got concerns about all of them right now,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a spending cardinal, told The Hill this week when discussing the outstanding funding legislation, which also covers funding for the FBI and the departments of Education and Health and Human Services. “We’re struggling to get it passed.”

Yet some Republicans have begun to downplay the need for the party to pass its remaining funding bills, particularly as both sides are already looking to kick the shutdown deadline beyond the November elections — the outcome of which could afford either party leverage in fiscal 2025 funding talks.

Asked about Johnson’s previous pledge to work through August to finish their spending bills, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said with disappointment, “It’s all kind of fake, anyway. It’s going to be an omnibus. Probably a CR, and a lame-duck omnibus.”

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said the question now is “whether or not Republicans are going to be smart enough not to hand the keys to the kingdom over to Democrats with an omnibus bill in December because we do a CR into the lame duck.”

“Everything else you’re going to write about is just bogus, inside-the-beltway nonsense,” Roy also said. “The only thing that’s going to matter is what we do a CR into March or a CR into December.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), head of the powerful funding committee, has also repeatedly advocated for lawmakers to wrap up their fiscal 2025 funding work before January.

“I was around here in 2017 when we tried that, and we had the House, the Senate, obviously President Trump won,” he said last month. But Republicans still “did not have more leverage, because you still have the filibuster in the United States Senate.” 

“We forced [Trump] to have to sign bills that he did not get to negotiate. … Frankly, they didn’t even have an [Office of Management and Budget] director at the time, we got [them] done,” he said. “I don’t think you do that to a new president, and honestly, I don’t think you do it to a new Congress.”