Congress

Progress on spending bills might have been an illusion all along

Progress on 2025 appropriations bills stalled in the House when members failed to pass a legislative appropriations bill.

Tom Temin@tteminWFED

July 15, 2024 2:25 pm

9 min read

Progress on 2025 appropriations bills stalled in the House when members failed to pass a legislative appropriations bill. Another spending bill is stalled by Republican amendments having to do with abortion in the District of Columbia. So … the summer and the current fiscal year grind on with no apparent way to avoid a continuing resolution. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin gets the latest from W-T-O-P Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller.

Interview Transcript:

Mitchell Miller Right. The Republicans had high aspirations for this summer, as we’ve talked about, they wanted to get all 12 appropriations done in time for them to break in August. And as I have to say, I predicted many weeks ago, it’s just not going to happen. There was a good start, as you indicated, they got four appropriations bills passed, and things looked like they were moving forward. And frankly, last week, Republican leadership and many appropriators at the senior level were really surprised by the fact that the $7 billion legislative branch funding, the appropriations bill did not pass narrowly. There was a group of conservative Republicans about 10, who did not vote along with it, and there were some absences and before they knew it, the bill had failed. And this is partly a surprise because this is a pretty easy lift generally for appropriators. It includes increased funding for US Capitol Police who have had to deal with more threats against lawmakers and security concerns in recent years. And there wasn’t a lot of real controversial issues in included in it, although there was a back and forth over a cost of living pay raise for members of Congress a freeze on that pay raise that created some dissension. So, this is one that now puts the appropriators behind the proverbial eight ball because now they do have eight appropriations bills that they are going to still have to pass, and they only have a couple of weeks to do it. And then they’re going to go on that big August recess as we head into the campaign season. So pretty significant setback for Republicans and the House last week,

Tom Temin Sometimes I don’t know whether they’re Sisyphus, Prometheus, or Tantalus, all of the tortured Greek, you know, mythological creatures, but look it up. I think maybe it’s a combination of all of them.

Join us on Oct. 1 and 2 for Federal News Network's Cyber Leader Exchange where we'll dive into how agencies are strengthening federal cyber capabilities.

Mitchell Miller There’s a lot of political mythology taking place here, sometimes with promises that just don’t get fulfilled.

Tom Temin So, you almost have like a circular kind of situation where Republicans taking satisfaction in the travails of the Democrats over President Biden and whether he’ll continue to run. Whereas the Democrats are taking delight in the Republicans unable to get their agenda on the budget done. And it seems politics overshadows getting things done,

Mitchell Miller Right, we’ve really had this incredible one year period where we had an insane amount of dysfunction last year, of course, with the inability to pick a new house speaker, the several weeks that there was just nothing getting done in terms of appropriations, that a lot of other issues. And now we moved to this year, and things have shifted, obviously, in connection with the whole controversy in connection with President Biden’s debate and what’s going to happen with that, and Republicans are feeling pretty good about it. So they’re kind of beating their chests, and saying, at least many of the Conservatives within the house are saying, Wait, why do we have to bargain with Democrats at this point, we shouldn’t even worry about this, because eventually, former President Trump is going to get elected, and we’re going to enlarge our majority in the House and potentially take over the Senate. Other Republicans are saying wait a second, we still need to do the heavy lifting that always has to be done in terms of appropriations. So, you have this, as you say, a big pendulum shift back and forth with the politics dominating everything rather than the nitty gritty of what gets done. And just one small example of that is what has happened with the riders on the financial services and General Government Services Bill, a relatively smaller appropriations bill. But this is again, one where a lot of Republican conservatives like to tack on these riders and one of them is in connection with reproductive rights. And they want to essentially take away a law that would protect people that go after certain reproductive actions, whether it’s an abortion or something else, and basically take away the protective law that would allow them to do that in DC. So, another example of the GOP trying to get inside the DC spending and appropriation. So that’s just one small example. But all of these things add up to a lot of sand in the gears. And the reason that we’re just not getting all these appropriations bills done on time.

Tom Temin We were speaking with Mitchell Miller, Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. And then there has been some positive testimony on Capitol Hill. I think Danny Warfel, the Commissioner of the IRS was touting some success, thanks to spending that has been showered on the IRS.

Mitchell Miller Right, this is a success. A story for the IRS and supporters of providing more funding under the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. That was what provided an additional $60 billion that many Democrats and some Republicans said is needed to help with enforcement at the IRS, which was, of course, dealing with such a huge backlog. But just one example of where the IRS if they have the money, if they can hire more accountants do more forensic investigations, they collected a billion dollars in taxes and penalties that were owed by hundreds of wealthy households about 1600 households. IRS commissioner Danny Werfel told lawmakers that they were getting all of this money back basically, because they were finally able to enforce what they needed to do. And he said that these weren’t even bills that were in dispute. These were bills that the people knew they owed the money, but because the IRS literally didn’t have the staffing, to do the investigations and collect, they were allowed to get away with this. So many of these people actually owed up to like a quarter million dollars in back taxes each. So, all of that money adds up. And so, this is a little success story as I said, for the IRS,

Tom Temin That’s even better than vacuuming under the sofa cushions.

Mitchell Miller That’s a lot of vacuuming and a lot of coins in the sofa.

Tom Temin But they did promise I think Werfel said that there’s much more to come on that front with more resources towards wealthier taxpayers. Some of the numbers are kind of gigantic sounding.

Read more: Congress

Mitchell Miller Right. I mean, this could ultimately be not just a billion, but we’re talking about 10s of billions of dollars, which would be huge. And so, I think we’re going to continue to see this progress moving forward, because obviously that $60 billion that the IRS received was significant. But they have really been trying to make use of that, of course, you’re going to see a lot of oversight related to whether or not they’re making good use of this money. But this seems to be a good first step.

Tom Temin Yeah, you don’t want $6 billion for each of 10 years from return as 1 billion in taxes. Alright, what else can we expect then in the week ahead? When do they go on break? And what’s the schedule looking like?

Mitchell Miller Well, they’ve got really basically two weeks to get anything done. And we’re going to see if they’re going to make any more progress on a lot of these appropriations bills that are coming up, a lot of them are much more difficult to get through than, for example, the legislative branch. They probably will take another crack at that and see if they can at least get something done. Before they leave, they would of course, like to have at least a bill or two, a major appropriations bill passed before they leave town. But after that, you know, then things that the cricket start to play around here in August, because they’re all going to be gone. And they’re all going to be campaigning in their districts. So, I think they may make a little bit of progress on some of these smaller appropriations bills. But aside from holding some hearings and doing some more oversight, don’t look for a lot to get done here in the next couple of weeks.

Tom Temin And there was a human-interest kind of good news story that WTOP has been reporting, and that is Jennifer Wexton, the Democratic Representative from Virginia has had some comeback success from her debilitating disease really in the ability to express herself through a speech generation device.

Mitchell Miller Yeah, this is really a wonderful story. And WTOP’s Jimmy Alexander reported on this, that she basically had them use a computer program that isolated all of her language from a lot of her speeches and her public appearances. And they were able to put this all in a database, and then allow her through a computer to basically get her voice back. And it’s just wonderful. I was actually just listening to this the other day, and it’s just so fascinating because I met her right when she was first starting to run for Congress in Northern Virginia and to see unfortunately, her illness, which they call Parkinson’s on steroids, what it has done to her, but also her incredibly heroic efforts to just keep working. She comes into the Congress and continues to do the work of her constituents, even though she’s dealing with this very debilitating illness. This allows her to literally get her voice back and to hear her you can actually hear the satisfaction in some ways with the way that she’s able to talk. And she also has some advice for people, which is if people offered to help you take that help. And she said, you know, initially she was probably a little hesitant, but she was so glad she did. And this voice program is something that’s just really wonderful for her and I’m really glad that we could bring that to listeners in our audience.