WASHINGTON — The House passed another short-term spending measure Thursday that would keep one set of federal agencies operating through March 8 and another set through March 22, avoiding a shutdown for parts of the federal government that would otherwise kick in Saturday. The Senate was expected to vote on the bill later in the day.
The short-term extension is the fourth in recent months, and many lawmakers expect it to be the last for the current fiscal year, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said negotiators had completed six of the annual spending bills that fund federal agencies and had “almost final agreement on the others.”
“We’ll get the job done,” Johnson said as he exited a closed-door meeting with Republican colleagues.
The vote to approve the extension was 320-99, easily clearing the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Democrats overwhelmingly voted to avert a partial shutdown. But the vote was much more divided among Republicans: 113 in support and 97 against.
At the end of the process, now expected to extend into late March, Congress is set to approve more than $1.6 trillion in spending for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 — roughly in line with the previous fiscal year. That’s the amount that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the White House last year before eight disgruntled Republican lawmakers joined with Democrats a few months later and voted to oust him from the position.
Some of the House’s most conservative members wanted deeper cuts for non-defense programs than that agreement allowed through its spending caps. They also sought an array of policy changes that Democrats opposed. They were hoping the prospect of a shutdown could leverage more concessions.
But Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., countered before the vote that shutdowns are damaging.
“I want the American people to know, Mr. Speaker, that this negotiation has been difficult, but to close the government down at a time like this would hurt people who should not be hurt,” Fleischmann said.
The split within the GOP conference on spending and their tiny House majority has bogged down the efforts to get the bills passed on a timely basis.
