Congress Makes Progress on Appropriations But Concerns Remain
On Saturday, Appropriations leaders reached agreement on totals for each of
the 12 FY 2020 funding bills, paving the way for Congress to pass as many of
those bills as possible in the next four weeks. The 12 bill allocations,
known as the “302(b)” levels, have not been made public but we expect that the
Labor-HHS-Education bill will get a boost above the effective 1% increase that
the Senate Appropriations Committee had originally approved this fall but well
below the 6.6% ($11.8 billion) increase in the House bill passed this spring.
However,
there is concern with how the bills will move forward before December 20th.
There could be a “minibus’ where a few bills are packaged together and voted on
as a group. Last year, the Defense and the Labor-HHS-Education bills were
packaged together and enacted before the start of FY 2019, which meant
those programs were not directly affected when much of the rest of the
government shut down when their funding bills were not enacted or
extended. That scenario could happen again, although some Members of
Congress may worry that passing the two biggest bills leaves less urgency to
pass the remaining 10 bills.
Another
option is that some bills are passed, but agreement on others is stymied; this
has happened when Congress couldn’t agree on funding for key programs but
didn’t want to hold up the rest of the bills. Another scenario is that
not all bills are finalized by December 20, requiring another CR. The
impeachment inquiry brings up a number of obstacles to the appropriations
process, including the time it takes and the rancor it causes. If the
House is voting on articles of impeachment at about the same time it is
scheduled to vote on appropriations bills, the process could stall for many
reasons.