WASHINGTON — Congress faces a Dec. 20 deadline to fund the government and avert a shutdown, and Speaker Mike Johnson says House Republicans will probably push the fight into early 2025 rather than reach a full-year funding deal this year.
“We’re running out of clock. December 20 is the deadline. We’re still hopeful that we might be able to get that done but, if not, we’ll have a temporary measure, I think that would go into the first part of next year and allow us the necessary time to get this done,” Johnson said on “Fox News Sunday.”
That would extend the deadline into early in President-elect Donald Trump’s second term. By then, Republicans will have taken control of the Senate from Democrats, while maintaining a narrow House majority, giving them more power over federal funding for the remainder of the fiscal year.
“That would be, ultimately a good move because the country would benefit from it — because then you’d have Republican control, and we’d have a little more say in what those those spending bills are,” Johnson said. “But the new reform agenda begins in earnest as soon as President Donald J. Trump takes the office in January, and we have a full agenda to run.”
Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, which is charged with writing funding bills, said there’s still no “top line” agreement between the parties on how much the government should spend.
He said it’ll likely be pushed into next year, January or March, with sometime in March being more likely.
“We had a meeting with the speaker earlier this week … he doesn’t think there’s any way that we can finish by the end of the year,” Aderholt said. “I’ll be very shocked if we do anything, if we get anything resolved by the end of the year.”
But other Republicans disagree with that approach and prefer to finish the funding deal this year, to avoid getting bogged down with it during Trump’s first 100 days. That is typically the window when a president has maximum political capital and some GOP senators would rather use that time to confirm his nominees and advance their legislative priorities, from tax cuts to border security.
“I’d rather do it this year,” Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., a member of the Appropriations Committee, said of a funding agreement.
“I would like to have a situation clear the deck so that we don’t have to deal with this next year,” Boozman said. “With a new administration coming in … confirmations are going take a lot of time. So we’ll have that to deal with. And then then we should be actually working on the next year’s appropriations.”
But even if they push the fight to early 2025, Republicans won’t have full control over spending decisions. Government funding legislation is subject to the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, which top Republicans have promised to preserve. That means they’ll have to reach a deal with Democrats, who currently control the Senate and want to pass full-year funding this year, not in 2025.
“There is no reason for further delay or to impair government agencies by forcing them to operate on autopilot for months to come,” Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., who will become vice chair in January, told reporters. “We should pass bipartisan, full-year spending bills before the end of the year.”
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the incoming Appropriations Committee chair, told NBC News: “I think we can get a deal, and I think it’s really important that we let the new administration have a clean slate and not be worrying about” this fiscal year’s funding.
Still, if GOP leaders put forward a stopgap bill (also known as a continuing resolution or “CR”) rather than a full-year deal, it’s likely that Democrats would accept it to prevent a shutdown.
“We’ve supported, I’ve supported CRs in the past. Let’s see what happens,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., the No. 3 House Democrat. “Mike Johnson has been very clear that he’s going to take his cues from the incoming president. That is not new to this topic, by the way, it has been something that has been consistent, so we’ll see what the incoming administration has to say about it, and what the posture of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle is over the next few weeks.”
Some conservatives see another reason for delay: to avoid a Christmas-time “omnibus” bill, combining all federal funding in one massive, last-minute package they don’t get to thoroughly vet.
“The Speaker has said he’s against an omnibus. A lot of us are against an omnibus. We don’t want to see any jamming through big spending bills,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas said, who said the odds are Congress will pass a continuing resolution “into the early part of the year, into March” of 2025.
“The bottom line is we’ve got to control spending and not allow there to be a runaway spending bill in December,” he said.
Boozman added that if Congress waits too long to pass a full-year funding bill, it could force automatic cuts to military and other programs that were baked into the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.
“The other thing is that it will trigger the defense cuts, which I think is a concern for lots of members,” he said.
