Senate Democrats ready for spending fight with House GOP

Senate Democrats are gearing up for a spending fight with House Republicans as negotiators in the upper chamber prepare to mark up government funding bills in the days ahead.   

Senate negotiators are expected to unveil funding legislation in the coming days, with plans to begin considering proposals over the next week as the annual appropriations season starts to heat up.

“It will be very difficult,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who is also an appropriator, told The Hill of challenges Congress will face in averting a shutdown this year. “We’ve got to agree to our agreements and stick with it.”

House GOP negotiators dialed up the temperature earlier this week when they announced they would mark up their fiscal 2024 spending plans to levels lower than the budget caps set as part of a deal struck between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

The matter was the subject of intense debate in a House hearing earlier this week, when Republicans defended the strategy as a means to further curb spending and tackle the nation’s deficit, while Democrats accused them of reneging on the agreement.

“Do you think any of us would have made a deal if we thought your [2022] number was the deal? What kind of deal is that? What kind of respect for yourselves is that?” said Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, at the time. 

The White House and House GOP leadership agreed to spending caps for fiscal 2024 as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA). Congress passed the bill earlier this month to raise the debt limit before an early June deadline to prevent a national default, along with several proposals aimed at cutting spending to buy necessary GOP support.

However, McCarthy has faced pressure from hard-line conservatives in the weeks since the bill’s passage, with the right flank flexing its muscles in the lower chamber to push leadership to seek more cuts through the annual appropriations process. 

Some Republican negotiations have expressed confidence that the conference will back the partisan bills now that leaders have affirmed they’ll mark up their legislation to fiscal 2022 levels, but there is uncertainty as to whether the party will stick together through the process. 

Hard-line conservatives are already making threats to thwart their party’s spending bills, raising the risks of a potential government shutdown later this year. Some have also accused leaders of resorting to budgetary “gimmicks” because GOP appropriators have proposed clawing back and repurposing some funding previously allocated for Democratic priorities.

“We need true 2022 levels, and then we ought to be utilizing targeted cuts and rescissions to go beneath that, not pretend 2022 levels plussed up with rescissions,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said.

At the same time, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has signaled the upper chamber will take a much different path, saying earlier this week, “In the Senate, we’re going to follow the agreement that everybody agreed to as passed and signed into law.”

Several appropriation subcommittee chairs and ranking members said Thursday they weren’t yet made aware of what their allocations would be for their various spending bills. But some are expecting an aggressive markup schedule this year, with hopes of passing funding bills out of committee after having not done so last year.

The House got a head start on their fiscal 2024 bills this year, with the full committee sending the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill and the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food, and Drug Administration bill, to the House earlier this week. 

Congress technically is supposed to finish passing its dozen annual appropriations bills by a late September deadline — when fiscal 2024 begins. But it’s seldom that lawmakers finish all of the bills on time, instead opting to pass a temporary stopgap bill to keep the government funded at current levels to buy time for a deal without the threat of a shutdown.

However, lawmakers on both sides are worried about added pressure from the FRA, which includes a penalty of automatic across-the-board cuts if lawmakers don’t put a bow on their annual spending bills by the end of the calendar year.

The different starting points both chambers are taking in the appropriations process underline the challenges Congress will face in trying to reach a bipartisan compromise later this year.

In recent days, even some Senate Republicans have withheld support for the House GOP plan, instead opting to wait and see what the conference can produce in the coming months. 

Pressed on whether he supported the direction, Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said he “supported the deal that passed which was, you know, obviously different spending levels.”

“We’ll wait and see what the Senate produces in terms of a package. House is going to do their thing,” he told The Hill on Thursday. “So I don’t have a lot of control over that, but hopefully we can control what we do here in the Senate.”

In remarks to The Hill on Thursday, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, expressed confidence that the GOP-led panel will be able to pass its bills in the weeks ahead. But whether House Republicans will be able to get their partisan plans across the floor without Democratic support is another question. 

“[House Appropriations Chairwoman] Kay Granger (R-Texas) has demonstrated she has control of her committee, and she’ll produce the bills probably by the August break,” Cole said. “Then the leadership needs to see can they produce these bills, can they get them across the floor?” 

“Then we’re in a position to sit down and have a genuine negotiation,” Cole said.

Mike Lillis and Laura Kelly contributed.