In the House, it’s one down and 11 to go for the appropriations bills that make up the federal budget for 2025. And lawmakers are set to make a lot of progress over the next several weeks, with an aggressive schedule of votes coming up. Loren Duggan is Deputy News Director at Bloomberg Government spoke with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview Transcript: 

Loren Duggan
This is the latest week that’s very spending focused in the House. As you mentioned, three of the bills on the floor, one has already gotten across the finish line on the House floor. And by the end of this week, the goal is to have everything through subcommittee as well. So the five markups this week will add to the seven that have already been approved at the subcommittee level. So this is part of their goal, get them all done out of committee, at least, by July 10. And then see where it goes from there.

Jared Serbu
I think we’ve seen at least some examples of policy writers that have made these into fairly one sided endeavors that are probably not too likely to make it cleanly through the Senate side. How unclean are things at this point?

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Loren Duggan
These are very much GOP bills, and they’re coming out of committee with GOP votes, and they’re gonna get across the floor with GOP votes. Very few Democrats, I think none may end up supporting these. We saw that right before the recess with the defense authorization bill, which sets policy but also has spending levels in it where it came out of committee, that one came out of committee very bipartisan vote by the end was pretty much a GOP focused affair. So these are also laying down markers for the debates we’ll have later this year between the Republican House, Democratic Senate, Democratic Administration about potentially final version. So it’s no surprise that Republicans want in their eyes, the most conservative, the most cutting and the most far reaching in terms of their policy goals in the bills that they’re getting through their chamber at least.

Jared Serbu
And the Senate, of course, as we said, is out this week, but where are they in terms of teeing up their appropriations bills. Anywhere close to where the house is?

Loren Duggan
No, nowhere close. They haven’t started, they’ve been working on reaching top line numbers, which is a really helpful thing. Because when you know what you’re going to spend a total you can figure out what you’re going to spend on each bill. They’re working hard to get to that, maybe when they get back in July they’ll get those numbers nailed down and then start getting them through committee. It’s usually a more bipartisan affair even at the committee level in the Senate, we’ll see if that holds true again, this year. There’s a debate over there about whether to add more money for defense spending that probably isn’t going to fly, given the larger picture that’s going on. So a lot still to come in the Senate side, but no votes yet, even at the committee level.

Jared Serbu
In your experience, how do election years tend to affect these appropriations cycles? Is it more likely that folks try to get all the way done before before the election, or they set things up so that they don’t have to worry about it until after the election?

Loren Duggan
Most of the time, it takes till after the election? And the question at some point it gets to how long is the continuing resolution going to run after Sept. 30, and beyond the election. It seems to me like no resolution is going to come of this until after the election, in part because the members of Congress will want to see what next year’s administration and Congress are going to look like if there’s a flip in one or both chambers and a change in the administration. You could see people holding on to finalize it in the new year. If things are pretty status quo, maybe they’ll try to wrap it up and get it off their plate before meeting as a new Congress and dealing with all that next year. So it’s probably something that’s going to go late into the year, given how narrow majorities are in the chambers anyhow.

Jared Serbu
And one of the few non spending focused highlights this week is Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary on Capitol Hill this week to testify. What are we expecting there?

Loren Duggan
He’s going to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He’s up there a fair amount, obviously talking about what his committee wants. But this is the committee that writes things like highway bills and FAA bills. They’re not up immediately, they just did the FAA bill, but it’s a chance for him to talk to members and share his priorities for the administration, and probably for Republican members on that panel to push back on some of the priorities they don’t agree with. So might be fairly standard fare, but a lot going on, obviously, in the transportation space, rails under that. And you could maybe see some discussion about rail safety. And also, I saw the Boeing chief executive was on Capitol Hill on the Senate side last week. I’m sure there might be questions about what they intend to do there. So always an interesting hearing when he comes to talk about all that department has to do.

Jared Serbu
One policy issue making its way through that’s not quite tucked into floor territory yet, but I guess we’re starting to see glimmers of a data privacy bill coming out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. What do we know about that?

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Loren Duggan
This is a project of Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-Wash.) who’s the chairwoman of that committee stepping down after this year. So this is kind of her last burst of activity. She’s working closely with Frank Pallone, the ranking member on data privacy legislation to set a national standard. We have both federal reporters, but also state reporters. And I can tell you that as you look across the country, states are doing a lot in data privacy, and not always going the same way in ways that make tech companies uneasy because they have one set of rules in one state and one in another. So one of the ideas here is come up with a national data privacy standard that would apply everywhere. There’s a bill that will likely be marked up this week that reflects the discussion that the two of them have had. But the Leadership isn’t 100% comfortable with that we’re hearing, and might not let it come to the floor in its current form. But getting that through committee with that kind of backing, probably on a bipartisan basis, would help build a case for it. And we’ll see if that’s something that can get done this year, because it is bipartisan, which in this environment, those are the only types of things that really stand a chance of getting done outside of the kind of routine business.

Jared Serbu
The state by state piece is interesting. It’s one of those areas where it’s just sort of a de facto California standard on a lot of things. Do we know if they’re gonna go so far as to try to preempt some of those state level data privacy rules.

Loren Duggan
That’s really the idea is try and come up with a national standard, which might be tough, and some people might fight against given all that’s gone on in California, where they have very tough laws and agencies focused on that. But some companies and some consumers would like to see the the national basis. So no matter where you live, you have the same protection. It might make it easier for businesses, some would argue, but we’ll see how far this particular piece of legislation can go.

Jared Serbu
Last thing before we go. We had the congressional baseball game a couple of weeks ago. This week is the congressional softball game, which folks are probably a little bit less familiar with. Tell us about that.

Loren Duggan
This is the congressional women’s softball game. And unlike the baseball game, which is Rs and Ds on different sides of the baseball field, this is the members of Congress playing together as one team and taking on members of the media. And it’s to raise money for awareness around breast cancer in particular. So another one of those kind of fun perennial congressional events with a little twist from what we saw at the baseball game. But that’s Wednesday night. If folks are interested they can look online, find out how to buy tickets to that.

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