Both houses of Congress are churning out appropriations bills, believe it or not

This week Congress is hard at work on spending bills for 2024. It’s the last work week before the August recess, as the fiscal year rushes towards Sept. 30. Bloomberg Government deputy news director Loren Duggan joins Federal Drive Host Tom Temin with a look ahead.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And just because they’re cranking out these bills doesn’t mean they’re going to agree on everything and that we won’t avoid the C.R. But tell us what is going on this final week before a big recess.

Loren Duggan Well, both chambers have been working pretty diligently on the spending bills, at least at the committee level in recent weeks, where, as of last Friday, we had 10 of the 12 through the House committee and eight of the 12 through the Senate committee. The big thing, though, is the way those two bills or two sets of bills are being written are very different. With the House coming in under the non-defense spending cap that they agreed to as part of the debt limit and the Senate adhering to those caps and also saying we’re going to tack on about another $13 billion or something like that in emergency funds beyond what we agreed to in the caps. Both those dynamics were forecast that even as they were signing that debt limit deal into law. But that’s the dynamic that’s going to persist. You’re going to have two very different sets of bills and you’re going to have to meet in the middle at some point, both on spending and then on all the riders and other provisions that a Republican House and a Democratic Senate might not necessarily see eye to eye on.

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Tom Temin Yeah, So that reconciliation is the thing, or the lack of it, it’s like one group is writing its bills in Farsi and the other is writing in Hebrew, and somehow they have to mash this together. And so that’s what’s going to take the time. And when do they return? They’re out for most of August. Right?

Loren Duggan They are out for most of August. Will come back in September with a few weeks to spare before September 30th and some sort of progress on spending on September 30th, especially given the dynamic we’re seeing here. We’re most likely to see a continuing resolution before October 1st start of the fiscal year. But they’re trying to make progress, as you noted, with two floor votes next week on a couple of the spending bills in the House trying to get these things moving. Some senators have said they’d like to see the Senate take up some of these bills when they get back in September as well. So start moving the bills, start getting the process going. But there’s a long way to go before we get to any sort of way for an agency to plan what its funding is going to be for the next fiscal year.

Tom Temin Yeah. So just to reiterate, basically the Senate is going with 2024 figures that were agreed to in the debt ceiling deal with limits. And the House is saying, yeah, that was great, but let’s do 2022 levels instead.

Loren Duggan Right. On the non-defense side, on defense side, both chambers are heading towards the same goal. But on the non-defense side, that’s where the cuts are coming in. And the bills that the House has been producing out of committee have some pretty significant cuts to them. And in some cases they’re offsetting it by cutting funding from elsewhere, for example, from last year’s reconciliation law, taking money away from the IRS that it was given in that law. So they’re trying to get those numbers down, however they can both lower programmatic levels and offsetting by cutting funding elsewhere.

Tom Temin Right. And on the DoD side, where there is some budget unanimity, the problem is the NDAA, which the Senate is going to finish. And there there’s some big philosophical differences with the NDAA that the House passed. Correct?

Loren Duggan Very, very big differences. This is a piece of legislation that they try to make as bipartisan as possible. And on the Senate side, it was bipartisan coming out of committee and so far a pretty bipartisan process where they’re setting up and knocking out some amendments here and there. They did a few last week. They’re going to try and do more this week. On the House side, when they pass their bill, it was very much a partisan bill with kind of a I think it was maybe 219 to 210. Pretty party line vote with a couple of crosses here and there. And that’s because of the adoption of amendments around abortion issues, DEI issues, transgender affirming care issues, things that were added to the bill to try to win the support of some of the harder line conservatives in the House. But now you have a bill that Democrats walked away from where Adam Smith, who’s the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said, I liked this bill out of committee. We were all ready to stand by it, but we have to withdraw our support. So you’re going to have to meet somewhere in the middle between those two bills to get the NDAA through, even if those top line numbers, which are very important, line up, it’s all the details in that easily 1200, 1500-hundred page bill, by the time they’re done with it. They’re going to have to reconcile all those along the way.

Tom Temin Oh, not like they have a heavy lift or anything ahead of them. We’re speaking with Loren Duggan, deputy news director for Bloomberg Government. And there is some fun stuff happening when they do return. UFOs seem to be hovering over the Congress the last few months. And what are they going to do about them?

Loren Duggan Well, there’s a hearing this week featuring somebody who’s kind of described as a whistleblower who’s worked on the unidentified autonomous phenomena, is what they refer to UAPs, rather than UFOs, now. But he’s going to go before a subcommittee where the chairman has said that Washington bureaucrats aren’t telling us the truth about what’s going on with this. And we’re going to try to get to the bottom of it in a hearing like this, where they’re going to hear from folks who have researched these incidents and say they’ve heard from officials what may have gone on. So it’s I think it’s going to be a very interesting hearing. There have been fairly serious hearings in recent years over these UAP and hearing from pilots and people in the military about what they’ve encountered. And so this is the latest of this and a Republican House subcommittee really focusing in on this issue. So we are going to watch this one because I think we could learn something very interesting and see what they have to say.

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Tom Temin Presuming nobody really thinks Area 51 has aliens and jars of formaldehyde and this kind of thing, people are concerned that it might be some technology from an opposing nation like China that we just can’t figure out how they can make a plane go sideways or something.

Loren Duggan Right. I mean, any sort of disadvantage that we would have in the military sphere because somebody has better technology than us is something that I think is right for the military just to research and for Congress to kind of plumb that issue. And that’s where they are right now with it. I’m not sure if we’ll see direct legislation out of anything that’s talked about here, but I think people instantly gravitate towards that Area 51 or scenes from Independence Day where there’s an alien craft somewhere in the desert. But I do think that that could be some of the questions. Do we have anything like that? I wouldn’t be shocked if somebody asked that point blank during the hearing.

Tom Temin Yeah, well, my understanding of this dates back to the day the Earth stood still. So you can look that one up in the movie database. And finally, Secretary Mayorkas of Homeland Security not off the hook at all yet in the House, is he?

Loren Duggan No, the House talked last week about some of the groundwork they’ve started laying for possible impeachment. And he is going to go into the House Judiciary Committee this week for probably another tough grilling. He’s had several over the course of the last year, as the department deals with the various issues that must confront, including what’s going on with the border, fentanyl and many of the other management issues that Republicans suppressed. I’m sure he’ll be talking about some of the immigration numbers that show maybe declines of crossing at the border. And will be presenting his best case as well. But it does seem like he is very much still under the gun. There are still going to be calls for his resignation and possible impeachment at some point. So, again, every time he’s up there, we’re trying to see what they’re asking and what they’re saying about the department.

 

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