Republican funding plans crumbling as House eyes early exit

House Republicans’ ambitious hopes of passing their annual government funding bills by next week are quickly crumbling as a tight schedule and intraparty rifts threaten efforts to approve their spending blueprints for 2025.

Republicans had previously aimed to have all 12 annual funding bills pass by the August recess. But the timeline has been slipping as leadership has punted plans for votes on legislation funding the Department of Agriculture and financial services amid concerns about riders related to reproductive rights. 

Late Tuesday, a planned vote on the bill to fund the Department of Energy was abruptly canceled.

And now, Republicans say leaders are planning to start August recess early this week, despite previous plans to hold votes into next week on their outstanding funding legislation.

One House Republican who spoke to The Hill said that a leadership office told them “point blank” that the House will not return for votes next week. Several others said they have heard votes are likely to be canceled, too.

That would be a change from Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) vow when he first took the gavel that the House wouldn’t recess without passing all 12 bills.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told The Hill on Tuesday that leadership will “make a formal announcement about next week’s schedule by tomorrow.”

Asked about plans for the House to tackle its outstanding funding bills, Scalise defended the House’s work so far, while noting the challenges staunch Democratic opposition and defections on the GOP side pose to party efforts to approve the remaining measures.

“When you have a situation where the Democrats all vote no on every appropriations bill, you eventually hit a wall because, you know, we have a few of our own members that vote against some of these bills.”

“We’ve passed about 70 percent of all government funding over to the Senate. At some point, it’s time for the Senate to start doing their work,” he said. The Senate has yet to pass any of its funding bills for fiscal 2025.

Republicans are pushing to get their annual spending bills covering the departments of Energy, Interior and other related programs across the floor this week. If they pass, Republicans will have approved half of their annual government funding plans. 

The bills are much more partisan in nature than those being crafted in the Democratic-led Senate, where a 60-vote threshold is required for most legislation.

However, there is much uncertainty about the House Republicans’ chances of passing the remaining funding bills. The divisions that derailed the conference’s efforts to pass its fiscal 2024 funding plans have made a reemergence.

Earlier this month, a small faction of Republicans tanked the party’s attempt to pass a bill to fund the legislative branch.

In remarks to reporters this week, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, said he’d heard some “pro-life” concerns over changes to the agriculture funding bill, which Republicans were previously expected to vote on this week. 

Earlier this year, Republicans notably left out language in the funding bill that would have limited access to the abortion pill mifepristone, after a similar push helped doom their fiscal 2024 plan following pushback from moderates. 

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the subcommittee that crafts the bill, expressed confidence in the measure’s chances of passage in comments to The Hill on Monday. He noted the legislation “decreases funding” and cited the House’s schedule, as Congress prepares for an address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, as explanation for the punted vote this week.

“I think that the major objections that often go for the reason it didn’t pass last year have been removed, so I don’t see a problem with it,” Harris, who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, also said when pressed about the bill not including the mifepristone language. 

But that hasn’t stopped others from taking issue with the move.

“That’s one of the issues that I identified,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), another member of the House Freedom Caucus, said when pressed on the matter, as well as his support for other measures. 

“My belief is you got to figure that stuff out, and you got to know in the aggregate what you’re trying to accomplish,” he said. “So, I think that bill’s currently stuck, and then we’ll have to kind of see what the deal is.”

At the same time, a bill that covers funding for Washington, D.C. — including emergency planning, security costs and other programs — is also seeing resistance from some moderates over a party-backed effort to target a Washington, D.C., law aimed at protecting employees’ reproductive rights.

The proposal was among the reasons the party struggled to pass the same funding bill measure last year. And if it stays as is, the bill could lose support from moderates again this time around.

“Last year, I voted against the bill for a few reasons, including that, and I still continue to oppose that provision,” Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) told The Hill on the matter earlier this year. “If it remains in the bill, I’ll vote against the bill again.”

An earlier schedule floated by House GOP leadership also aimed for a vote on the annual Justice Department funding bill this week, but pressed on that measure, Cole said “that’s always tough,” while noting funding for the FBI’s headquarters “has been a big bone of contention.”

His comments come months after hard-line conservatives fumed over the inclusion of dollars for a new FBI headquarters tucked into a larger fiscal 2024 government funding package that eventually passed Congress, despite immense backlash from the conference’s right flank. 

But that doesn’t mean leadership isn’t facing some pressure to move forward trying to pass the measures.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said leadership ought to “hash” out agreement on the remaining funding bills in “as much time as it takes to get hashed out,” while speculating leadership is punting votes on some of the outstanding bills because they lack sufficient support.

“But that’s not how you do in the business arena. If you’ve got a problem, you face it,” he said.