Government Shutdown Postponed

L . Thomas Block
Key Takeaways
  • Congress returned to work with a government-shutdown deadline scheduled for Friday, but that deadline has been postponed.
  • This will allow certain federal departments to continue running until March 8, and the two major ones – Defense and HHS – running until March 22.
  • House Speaker Johnson can expect continued challenges managing disagreements between the conservative and moderate factions of House Republicans.

Congress returned to DC this week after a two-week recess for Presidents’ Day, facing a government shutdown scheduled to start at midnight on Friday. President Biden summoned the bipartisan leadership to the White House on Tuesday, and by Thursday the House and Senate were able to pass an extension of current funding for at least a week.

Under a plan developed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a two-tier funding structure has been accepted where departments such as Agriculture, Interior, House, and Transportation will have their budgets run until next Friday, March 8 while the larger Departments such as Defense and Health & Human Services (HHS) will run until March 22.

While the votes were by large margins and bipartisan, the House vote had some warning signs for the Speaker.  In the House the vote was 320 YES to 99 NO; but 97 of the 99 NO votes came from conservative Republicans.  These are the same Republicans who drove former Speaker McCarthy out of office for working with Democrats. With only 218 Republicans currently in the House, the Speaker has very little wiggle room in keeping the government open.

The Senate vote was equally bipartisan, with a vote of 77 YES to 13 NO. Again, all the NO votes came from Republicans.

The plan of the Leadership is to have votes on the budgets for those departments that need action by next Friday next week.  There is no guarantee that this strategy will work, especially with some Republicans wanting to see policy riders dealing with hot-button social issues added to the spending bills.  There are other Republicans who want to see a full-year Continuing Resolution (CR) that, under the Debt Ceiling Legislation, requires 1% across-the-board spending cuts.  As talks progress over the weekend, Speaker Johnson will have a challenge keeping a majority of his fractious caucus together on final votes for each spending bill.  The Republicans have an internal rule that legislation needs a majority of the majority, in other words at least half of the 218 Republicans needs to vote YES, and he already has 97 on record as voting NO.

Next week will see more headline risk related to potential government shutdown coming out of DC.

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L . Thomas Block
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