The powerful Senate Appropriations Committee is plowing ahead with plans to mark up its first batch of fiscal 2025 funding bills next week, even as Republicans and Democrats struggle to strike an overall deal on how to fund the government for much of next year.
The committee is set to mark up full-year funding plans for the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, rural development, military construction and the legislative branch.
The legislation covers three of the dozen annual spending bills negotiators are looking to move out of committee over the summer as both chambers work to ramp up their fiscal 2025 funding work ahead of a shutdown deadline in late September.
The committee will also consider proposed allocations for each of the funding bills during the full committee markup session next Thursday. The vote comes as Republican and Democratic lawmakers have yet to strike an overall top-line funding deal for fiscal 2025.
However, the funding blueprints set to come out of the committee in the weeks ahead are expected to be much more bipartisan in nature than the fiscal 2025 spending plans that have moved across the House floor so far.
Last week, the House passed three bills laying out fiscal 2025 funding for the departments of Homeland Security, Defense and State. However, the bills passed in mostly party-line votes as many Democrats have come out in sharp opposition to the House GOP’s funding proposals, which they have bashed as being packed with partisan riders they’ve panned as “poison pills.”
The bills are also written at funding levels that Democrats say undercut a bipartisan deal struck between the White House and Republican leadership last year to raise the debt limit and set new spending limits.
On the Senate side, Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has emphasized the need for parity in increases to both defense and nondefense programs for fiscal 2025.
“The Appropriations Committee has now held nearly 40 hearings on the resources that we will need in fiscal year ’25. We’ve discussed exactly what our nation needs to stay strong, safe and competitive,” she said last month.
“And there’s a big obvious takeaway from those hearings, the [Fiscal Responsibility Act] caps for FY ’24 are already causing serious pain and serious challenges, and the caps for FY ’25 are grossly inadequate,” she said.