Fight over spending stopgap foreshadows funding challenges in new Congress

Source: Aol/The Hill

December 29, 2024 at 5:00 PM


The messy government shutdown fight this month foreshadows some of the challenges House Republicans could face next year, as a major test on funding awaits the incoming GOP “trifecta.” Congress narrowly averted a government shutdown last week — but not without a bit of drama. GOP leadership struggled to meet tough demands from President-elect Trump, while navigating a tight Republican majority to produce a deal that could also pass the Democratic-led Senate in the eleventh hour.

Lawmakers ultimately voted to keep the government’s lights on through mid-March. But some see the fight as a kind of practice run by Republicans for when they are expected to ramp up work on the 12 fiscal 2025 funding bills early next year. “The reality, for the better part of the first year, [is] we’re going to have a one-vote majority,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), a spending cardinal, said earlier this month. “So, in a way, it’s almost like practice, showing what we’re going to have to do.”

“On the upside, we know we’re going to have to sit in rooms and communicate and listen and work through some things,” he said. “Probably not going to be all easy times. Some will be. But I think it was a good trial run for 2025.” House GOP leadership has already seen challenges in wrangling the various factions of its party to pass funding bills with a razor-thin majority in the lower chamber.

Leaders previously aimed to have all 12 annual funding bills passed by the August recess. But those hopes were deflated over the summer as internal divides over issues such as abortion reemerged. “When you have a situation where the Democrats all vote no on every appropriations bill, you eventually hit a wall because, you know, we have a few of our own members that vote against some of these bills,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said at the time, while also calling on the Senate “to start doing their work.”

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