GOP tempers expectations on appropriations bills

House Republicans are pressing forward with aggressive plans to mark up and pass their 12 annual funding bills for fiscal 2025 before the August recess, but some are dialing back expectations after intraparty divisions over spending plagued the process last year.

House Republicans took a key step this week in passing legislation out of committee to fund military construction and the Department of Veterans Affairs for most of next year.

The bill marked the first of the 12 partisan funding plans for fiscal 2025 that Republicans hope to move out of committee and across the floor by the end of July — when Congress gears up to take its monthlong August recess.

The proposed schedule was detailed by House GOP leadership to members earlier this week.

But despite optimism from parts of the conference, some are tempering expectations given the late start.

“If we don’t hit any speed bumps, it could work,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the funding subcommittee that oversees dollars for the Department of Agriculture, said this week when asked about leadership’s proposed floor schedule. “But we usually hit speed bumps.”

He added that he thinks the party’s goal of passing all 12 bills across the floor “won’t be any easier” than last year — when intraparty divides over spending and policy areas such as abortion dominated public attention as the conference struggled to unify behind its appropriations bills.

“We’re saying we’re going to get our 12 appropriation bills done,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), another spending cardinal, told The Hill, while adding that he’s “optimistic and excited” as the party ramps up the annual funding process.

Fleischmann and other GOP members of the House Appropriations Committee said getting bills passed by the powerful panel that crafts the measures will be easier than getting them done on the floor.

“The floor poses some very interesting dynamics,” he said. “You got to be able to pass a rule. If you can’t pass a rule, and you’ve got to do it on suspension, and you’re not going to get Democratic votes. Inherently, there were some challenges there that we’re going to have to overcome.”

Last year, the House GOP passed more than half of their partisan appropriations bills through the chamber, but five others were held up when hard-line conservatives tanked procedural votes amid internal disagreements on spending.

Republicans who were upset with those tactics say that ended up giving Democrats more leverage, since the party needed help from the minority to pass rules that got them to the substance of the bills on the floor.

Before bringing bills to the floor this time around, Fleischmann also said he thinks the conference will need to “have an intrafamily meeting with all three wings … and see where we are before we get to the floor” — after leadership suffered some embarrassing blows last year when it had to repeatedly pull floor votes on the conference’s funding bills largely due to intraparty divides.

The House Appropriations Committee has only released two bills this week, including legislation to fund the legislative branch. Democrats have come out strongly against the measures over so-called “poison pill” riders and Republicans’ overall proposed funding levels due to cuts to nondefense programs.

In remarks to reporters Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the annual funding bills that have come from the Republican side so far have “zero chance of becoming law,” accusing the party of pursuing cuts and “right-wing” policies that won’t pass the Democratic-led Senate.

He criticized legislation as “stripping away reproductive freedom from military women, attacking the LGBTQ+ community” and “trying to eliminate programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Such efforts will be “dead on arrival,” Jeffries said. 

He also accused Republicans of trying to “shut down the government” ahead of the November presidential election — as lawmakers expect the outcome of the race to have a major impact on the appropriations process for fiscal 2025.

Another key disagreement to watch for in the months ahead is how both sides interpret a previous bipartisan deal to suspend the debt limit last year. The deal, which kept the nation from what experts say could have been an unprecedented default, included a budget limits agreement that lawmakers are still grappling with as they work out fiscal 2025 funding.

Republicans have sought to sidestep what lawmakers have described as a handshake deal between the White House and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that would plus up spending for nondefense programs beyond the caps signed into law. 

Many Republicans say Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is not beholden to McCarthy’s deal. Democrats say the handshake agreement was key to locking down support from their side of the aisle at the time and have accused Republicans of reneging on the overall deal.

Senate Democrats have already fired a warning shot over the matter, with Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently saying the upper chamber will “include the full resources that House Republicans and the president agreed to last year.”

At the same time, senators on both sides have signaled more dollars are needed for defense spending beyond the modest increase in the budget caps agreement — which could mean a wider gulf when it comes time for both chambers to bring their own bills to the bargaining table to produce the final compromise measures for fiscal 2025.

The Senate also has yet to decide on a top-line number for fiscal 2025 spending, as Republicans in the upper chamber have also brushed off calls for parity in increases to defense and nondefense levels.

“We have two major competitors: the Russians and the Chinese. We have the Iranians, and we have their proxies. This is the most dangerous time since the Berlin Wall came down, and the defense spending needs to reflect the needs of our country, which clearly argues against having an arbitrary line that doesn’t spend more on defense than domestic,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said earlier this month.

Congress still has more than four months on the calendar until a Sept. 30 deadline to pass legislation keeping the government funded for the next fiscal year. But it is likely to miss that deadline, and to have to approve a short-term funding measure to prevent a shutdown.

“This is just something that has always been challenging for Congress, to get these bills done in full and on time,” Andrew Lautz, a fiscal policy analyst with the Bipartisan Policy Center, said in an interview. 

He also noted that, since the enactment of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, there has only been a handful of instances in which lawmakers have had all 12 bills signed into law on time.

“It’s not something that’s going to be solved overnight or even in a six-month period or even over a year,” Lautz said Friday. “But I think they need to have conversations — really over the next couple of years — to assess what’s not working, because pretty much any lawmaker and most of their constituents, the general public, can see that the process is not working right now.”