Congress starts the new year the way it ended a chaotic 2023, with an unresolved standoff over appropriations for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1 and no certainty about when, or even whether, lawmakers will move a new farm bill in 2024.
The House and Senate don’t return from their holiday break to Washington until next week, and they’ll face a possible shutdown of some government agencies as soon as Jan. 20.
A continuing resolution is currently funding USDA and FDA and several other departments and agencies, which are funded at FY23 levels until Jan. 19, while lawmakers continue trying to agree on the fiscal 2024 appropriations bills. The rest of the government is funded only through Feb. 2.
Separately, lawmakers also have yet to reach an agreement on border security measures that House GOP leaders are demanding in return for aid to Ukraine.
House Republicans also are insisting they won’t support another CR but have yet to reach an agreement with Democrats on the topline spending level for FY24 and the limits for the 12 individual appropriations bills that are needed to fund the departments and agencies. The lack of agreement has made it impossible to finalize details of the bills.
Efforts to move four bills — including the measure that funds USDA and the FDA — by the Jan. 19 deadline will mark the first test of how Congress will approach the looming funding questions. It’s a tall order since lawmakers have little time to finalize the bills and move them across the House and Senate floors, said Roger Szemraj, a policy adviser with OFW Law.
Another eight bills to fund the rest of the government must be passed by Feb. 2.
“If we start making progress on some of the first four — if we get some real deals on (those bills) — then it's possible the others are going to come about,” Szemraj said.
Some lawmakers say they may have no other choice than to pass another CR to fund the government for the rest of FY24, which ends Sept. 30.
“If you have a CR that takes you much further into the year, then the argument will be, we might as well just skip this year's appropriation bills and go to ’25,” said Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, a senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“It's time for us in February and March to start working on the next year's bills. So January, February, really is the deadline, if we're going to do actual bills,” he added.
Congress will need to pivot relatively quickly to writing the FY25 spending bills because of the limited legislative days on the election year calendar.
North Dakota Republican John Hoeven, the top GOP member of the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, told Agri-Pulse he wasn’t worried about a government shutdown despite the House-Senate divide, suggesting another CR is a possibility.
“It's just whether we get an appropriation done or end up with another CR,” he said.
The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, told reporters ahead of the holiday break that it usually takes four to six weeks to finish appropriations bills once there is agreement on spending levels.
House Republican leaders have agreed to fund the government at the spending caps agreed to as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal and insist that there can’t be any add-ons that go beyond that. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., faced continued pressure over the holiday break from the House Freedom Caucus to cut spending.
It’s easy to be “in the know” about what’s happening in Washington, D.C. Sign up for a FREE month of Agri-Pulse news! Simply click here.
“As Congress negotiates FY 2024 government funding, Republicans must truly reduce programmatic spending year-over-year from the enacted FY 2023 level, and end the disingenuous gimmicks to conceal from Americans the real spending harm being perpetrated by their elected representatives,” the Freedom Caucus said in a Dec. 28 statement.
There isn’t a lot of time for lawmakers to get much done this year either because of the election calendar. Once the House begins its business in 2024, it is only scheduled to be in session for eight weeks before the Easter break and then only nine weeks between then and July. The Senate is in session for one more week in the first quarter.
The Republican and Democratic conventions take place in July and August, and lawmakers will mostly be out of session until after the November elections.
House Ag Chair Glenn 'GT' Thompson, R-Pa.Meanwhile, Johnson saw his narrow House margin shrink once again on Dec. 31 with the resignation of California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, whose tumultuous 10-month tenure as speaker ended when he was ousted in October. Republicans now control the House 220-213, meaning that they can lose just three votes and still pass a bill that Democrats are united in opposing. And the Republican majority will shrink again, to 219, on Jan. 21, when Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, resigns to take the presidency of Youngstown State University.
Congress has given itself until the end of this year to pass a new farm bill because of a one-year extension of the 2018 law that was passed in November, but another extension is a distinct possibility.
House Ag Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., has said that the earliest his committee could take up a new bill is March, given that the appropriations process will dominate the calendar until then. But even a March goal is shaky unless he can strike a deal with panel Democrats on ways to fund increased spending in the commodity title.
Ahead of the holiday break, Thompson said that lawmakers needed to find as much as $70 billion to $100 billion in savings in existing farm bill programs to fund needs within commodity programs and other titles of the bill.
Passing a partisan Republican bill is seen as virtually impossible, given the razor-thin GOP majority.
Noah Wicks contributed to this report.
For more news, go to Agri-Pulse.com.
