Republicans worry key McCarthy spending promise is unraveling amid Speaker’s fight

Some House Republicans are concerned a key spending promise made by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) could be on the skids as a thorny GOP battle to elect his successor drags into its third week. 

Republican fears are swirling that Congress could be on the path to jamming through another trillion-dollar omnibus spending package in the months ahead amid stalled progress in both chambers to pass all 12 annual government funding bills.

“I think we are, and that’s awful. All an omnibus does is puts a lump sum of money, that the taxpayers have no idea where it’s going,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) told The Hill this week, calling the idea “not right for anybody.”

When Republicans reclaimed the House majority, they criticized the passage of a $1.7 trillion omnibus as bad governance and excessive spending.

“One thing you gotta know on principle too: We’re not taking up an omnibus,” McCarthy said earlier this year. “It’s not going to happen. We gotta get back to doing the work that the American people expect us to do.”

But as the party works to unify behind a new leader in wake of McCarthy’s ouster, some worry the prospects of another omnibus bill are rising.

“It’s certainly on the horizon. Whether or not we get there, we’ll see,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) said Thursday. 

House Republicans had hoped to move their dozen annual spending bills separately through the chamber over the summer in order to begin laying out their starting points for eventual talks with the Democratic-led Senate. 

The House has so far only passed four of the bills, and the party’s strategy for the remaining funding legislation remains up in the air as the Speakership fight continues. 

“We can’t do anything until we get a Speaker,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who heads the subcommittee that oversees spending for the Department of Justice, told The Hill.

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the subcommittee that crafts the full-year funding bill for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, echoed a similar sentiment, suggesting there “could be informal talks between staff.”

“But until you know what the bills are going to look like, there’s limited what you could talk about,” he said this week.

The pair’s subcommittees are also the only two that haven’t seen their bills reported out of the larger House Appropriations Committee, as negotiators indicate further cuts could be made to those bills.

Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.), who serves on the Appropriations Committee and is a member of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus, said this week that he and other panel members “are continuing to press” for an overall top-line spending level of $1.471 trillion for the funding legislation. That figure is in line with a spending limit that Republicans sought in an economic bill that passed earlier this year.

“And a lot of its success will be determined in a large part depending on who’s going to be the Speaker and how we move forward from there, but we don’t have much time,” Cline said of the push on Wednesday.

The race for Speaker has already eaten up a chunk of floor time this month, and with the conference’s recent vote rejecting House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) bid for Speaker on Friday afternoon, uncertainty clouds the party’s next steps.

“I think this struggle for Speaker, this is about whether you’re voting for an omnibus or 12 separate bills,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said Thursday. 

Massie thought electing Jordan as Speaker would have eased GOP concerns about an omnibus given his plan for averting a shutdown, which is set to begin if Congress fails to pass a new funding measure by Nov. 17.

The plan, as explained by Massie, would have kept the government funded at levels set in the previous omnibus through a medium-term stopgap that would run past April. At that point, a 1 percent cut to nondefense and defense programs could kick in if Congress still hasn’t approved its 12 appropriations bills, a clause of the Fiscal Responsibility Act signed into law by President Biden earlier this year. That bill also raised the debt ceiling.

“That gives you enough runway to get all 12 bills out without a gun to our head, and then to give [the] Senate plenty of time to respond to those 12 bills,” Massie said then.

That idea was met with concern from defense hawks in both chambers shortly after, however. 

“No way. That destroys our military,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters Tuesday, calling the idea “horrible.”

While the Senate has reported all 12 of its annual funding bills out of committee with overwhelming bipartisan support, the upper chamber still has yet to clear any of the legislation on the floor.

Some had been hopeful the Senate would ramp up consideration of its first batch of funding bills this week, but negotiators say the package, also known as a “minibus,” hit a roadblock amid negotiations on amendments. 

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said Wednesday that the package — which covers funding for the departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Food and Drug Administration — was supposed to be one of the “easier” ones to pass.

“Obviously, we tried to pick packages that had greater likelihood, more bipartisanship,” she said, adding that the holdup was not “a good indication of moving anything forward.”