Congressional leaders will unveil legislation Sunday to extend federal government funding to March, attempting to dodge a government shutdown with another stopgap spending bill, Ednews informs via the Washington Post.
Funding for 20 percent of the government — including the Transportation Department, some veterans’ assistance and food and drug safety programs — is set to expire Jan. 20, just after midnight. The rest — including for the Defense and State departments — expires on Feb. 2.
The measure that Congress will consider in the coming week will extend those deadlines to March 1 and March 8, respectively, a person familiar with congressional negotiations said Saturday. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said his office planned to release legislative text of the agreement Sunday evening.
The legislation, which the Senate has already taken procedural steps to advance, would fund the government at current spending levels and maintain the staggered funding approach favored by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
Johnson and Schumer have agreed on an overall $1.66 trillion spending deal for the 2024 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. But lawmakers won’t have time to enact it before the deadlines, and some House Republicans attempted to scuttle the proposal late last week.
Now lawmakers are up against the clock to pass a stopgap funding bill — called a continuing resolution, or CR — to prevent a partial shutdown just after midnight on Jan. 20.
The Senate on Tuesday will take steps to advance that measure to buy Congress more time to finish a series of full-year spending bills, called appropriations. The upper chamber will have to move with uncommon speed to vote on that and send it to the House for approval before the end of the week.
Even if it arrives in the lower chamber, the bill’s success is far from certain. Johnson fended off pressure all last week from the archconservative House Freedom Caucus to abandon the agreement with Schumer and restart negotiations or threaten a shutdown.
