A looming government shutdown has come into sharper focus, as the White House on Aug. 31 asked Congress to approve a short-term funding measure to keep the federal government running before it runs out of money at the end of September.
This year, both the House and Senate have tried to pass individual appropriation bills rather than another omnibus measure, although reaching a consensus has been elusive.
With just 11 legislative days left in the current fiscal year, the pressure is building as just one of 12 regular appropriations bills has cleared the House, while none has made it through the Senate.
Now, the White House has entered the fray, with a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) telling media outlets on Aug. 31 that a short-term funding measure is needed to avert a shutdown.
“Although the crucial work continues to reach a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on fiscal year 2024 appropriations bills, it is clear that a short-term continuing resolution (CR) will be needed next month,” the spokeswoman said.
She added that the OMB would provide Congress with help to avert “severe disruptions” to government services during the first quarter of fiscal 2024.
There’s been some progress on building congressional support for a stopgap measure, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) telling his Republican colleagues that lawmakers would likely have to pass a short-term solution in the form of a continuing resolution.
‘We Should Not Fear a Government Shutdown’
At the end of July, as lawmakers broke for their August recess, work on funding the government remained mostly incomplete, with some musing that reaching a consensus would be tricky.“We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said at the time.
Some members of the House Freedom Caucus said at the time that voters elected a GOP majority in the House to rein in out-of-control government spending and so Republicans should be prepared to use every tool available to push for spending cuts.
“We should not fear a government shutdown,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said at a news conference at the end of July. “Most of the American people won’t even miss [it] if the government is shut down temporarily.”
Some House Republicans disagreed, with Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) saying it’s an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel the effects of a shutdown, while adding that Republicans would end up taking the blame for it.
“We always get blamed for it, no matter what,” Mr. Simpson said at the time. “So, it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”
Mr. McCarthy said at the time that he doesn’t want the government to shut down and expressed hope that a deal could be reached on spending cuts.
“We’ve got till Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,“ Mr. McCarthy said. ”I want to find that we can find common ground.”
‘Status Quo’
House Freedom Caucus members are pushing back against a short-term resolution to avoid a shutdown.The House Freedom Caucus’s demands include capping spending levels below the top-line numbers agreed to as part of recent debt ceiling negotiations, opposing any “blank check for Ukraine,” and addressing what they call the “unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI” to conduct political “witch hunts.”
Members of the group have repeatedly denounced the multiple indictments against former President Donald Trump, who is the front-runner in the GOP primary field for the 2024 presidential election, as politically motivated.
However, Goldman Sachs said that the economic effects if Congress fails to pass a stopgap measure or bigger funding bill by Sept. 30 would be modest, and that markets haven’t in the past reacted strongly to government shutdowns.
