Senate sends $460B bill to avert shutdown to Biden’s desk just hours before deadline

Senators on Friday passed a bill to fund a slew of government agencies for the rest of fiscal year 2024, sending the measure to President Biden’s desk hours before a shutdown deadline after Congress has struggled for months to approve its full-year spending bills.

The Senate voted 75-22 to pass the six-bill, $460 billion package on Friday evening, approving full-year funding for the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Commerce and Energy, among other offices.

The Senate’s approval caps off weeks of tough bipartisan, bicameral funding talks, which began to pick up at the start of the year, only after a months-long stalemate over how to fund the government for fiscal 2024. 

But the package marks just the first of two batches of spending bills Congress is working to pass this month. Lawmakers are also staring down a March 22 deadline for the remaining six full-year funding bills, which fund areas like the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services — and which lawmakers say may be even more difficult to find bipartisan agreement on.

Passage of the so-called minibus Friday evening followed last-minute Senate drama that threatened to push the final vote beyond the midnight funding deadline.

An eleventh-hour dispute over amendments helped delay efforts to pass the legislation, as Republicans looked to force votes on a number of measures in thorny areas like the border and earmarks. Any changes to the bill would have sent it back to the House for further consideration, and the lower chamber had already left town for the weekend.

The bill eventually cleared a procedural hurdle setting up passage later on Friday, but absent support from Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Both senators seek to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) as head of the conference and had hoped to block the effort as they pressed for amendment votes. 

Leaders then came to an agreement to vote on several amendments, none of which passed.

The measure passed the House on Wednesday in a bipartisan 339-85 vote, but getting an agreement on the bills was a hard-fought battle from the start, as both parties entered bipartisan negotiations with drastically different funding proposals weeks back.

Negotiators on both sides have discussed the difficulty in divvying up dollars for programs within the tight constraints imposed as part of a previous spending caps deal brokered by Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last year.

“It was a really, really, really hard budget. Nobody’s going to like our Interior budget because we had to cut, we had to cut a lot,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), top Republican on the subcommittee that hashes out funding for the Interior Department, said Friday.  

Congress had to pass four stopgap measures to keep the government funded into fiscal year 2024, which began Oct. 1. McCarthy was ousted as Speaker, in part, for working with Democrats to pass one of those stopgaps.

Even after a deal on the six-bill minibus was announced, conservatives came out strongly against it, panning the overall cost, the exclusion of many of their policy priorities, and the inclusion of billions of dollars in earmarks.

Still, GOP leadership has claimed some key wins, including cuts to nondefense funds and more money to fight fentanyl. 

Democrats have touted wins as well, including the exclusion of conservative policy riders, as well as funding increases in areas like housing and nutrition assistance.

“We’ve fully funded WIC so seven million moms and kids won’t be malnourished. We’ve built on the Infrastructure law by providing billions to repair our roads and bridges and highways,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said ahead of the measure’s passage on Friday. “We’ll be able to hire more air traffic controllers and rail safety inspectors. And we’re taking care of our veterans with support for veteran’s homelessness, mental health, and women veterans.” 

House GOP negotiators said ahead of the mammoth bill’s rollout last weekend that Democrats some gained leverage in funding talks as spending divides in the Republican conference have continued to dominate headlines over the past year.  

The package on Friday marks the first full-year funding bills sent out of the divided Congress since Republicans took back the House in late 2022.

But not all Democrats are happy with the plan. 

Some Democrats have voiced frustration with a concession on a GOP-backed guns-related provision aimed at allowing veterans determined unable to manage their benefits to be able to purchase guns.

Republicans say the proposal is important to keep veterans who need help managing their money from losing their gun rights. But Democrats have sounded alarms about the impact the measure could have on veterans’ suicide rates, as well as the potential for those deemed “mentally incompetent” to have firearms.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a spending cardinal, is among the senators who voted against the package on Friday, after describing the rider as a “terrible new gun policy rider that significantly rolls back the firearms background check system.”