The NBC News last night led off noting that a last-minute deal is in the works to avert a federal shutdown before the deadline of January 19.
Congressional leaders reached a $1.66 trillion agreement Sunday to finance the federal government over 2024, preserving funding for key domestic and social safety net programs despite GOP demands to cut the budget. However, lawmakers are up against a hard deadline to pass legislation to codify the deal and avert a partial government shutdown in 12 days.
The deal allows for $886.3 billion in defense spending and $772.7 billion in domestic discretionary spending. It also rescinds $6.1 billion in coronavirus emergency spending authority and accelerates cuts from $80 billion in new funding that the Internal Revenue Service was supposed to get under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, stripping $20 billion of that total this year.
Another budget flashpoint involves the Social Security Administration (SSA) given the agency's fixed costs typically rise from $600m to $700m annually. This is also why the Biden Administration has requested a $1.3 billion increase in the SSA's customer service budget for 2024. This is to address one of the SSA's main choke points: the agency's 1-800 toll free phone line for which lack of workers means delays in processing disability applications. However, the House GOP demands a cut of $250m in that spending. Clearly they want potential beneficiaries to go and pound sand.
Funding for roughly 20 percent of the federal government — including for essential programs such as some veterans assistance and food and drug safety services — expires on Jan. 19, and money for the rest of the government runs out shortly after that, on Feb. 2. But lawmakers have not yet agreed on how to pass full-year spending bills or more temporary funding. Without action by the first deadline, a partial government shutdown would begin. Congress returns next week with little time to work out the details.
The White House’s top budget official told reporters Friday that the GOP tactic significantly increased the risk of a shutdown. Let's get clear these reprobates already reneged on a deficit - debt deal which was to have extended funding - and no further costly antics - until January 2025. That deal was finalized by then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy but then upended when the Reep Chaos Caucus got rid of him.
Much of the blame for the current fiscal drama can be blamed on the Dems for being way too cavalier about how they handled things as their House terms came to conclusion after the 2022 mid terms. Democrats largely lost leverage with the debt ceiling battle once they assumed - back in the lame duck session of 2022 - that they could roll over Kevin McCarthy and his extremist 'Freedom Caucus' in any debt ceiling battle. So they even seemed to relish the coming battle in 2023 confrontation, apparently believing they could be “won". They were wrong.
Meanwhile, Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the WaPo on Friday:
“I wouldn’t say pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic [about the odds to avert a shutdown]. Earlier this week, their border trip left me with more concerns about where they’re headed."
Well, it's still unclear whether they will continue to head for chaos, and plan to drag the rest of the country with them. But at least even the hard right editors of the WSJ have their eyes on these misfits, writing:
"House Freedom Caucus members are denouncing the deal as a sellout, but they always do. Could they do better with a three-seat margin in the House and Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House? There’s no evidence they have a plan beyond the futile gesture of shutting down the government."
The drama, of course, is the cost of putting renegade right wing loons in positions of governance. Especially in the House. Because basically the Freedom Caucus doesn't really want to govern, it wants to do performance art. In the clown genre.
Lastly, let me also remind those still reading my blog, that during the last debt-ceiling standoff in 2011 investor confidence was shaken to the core. Analyses after that near-default showed that the plunging stock market vaporized $2.4 trillion in household wealth, which took years to rebuild, and cost taxpayers billions in higher interest payments.
The lesson in all of this should be absolutely clear by now: casting ballots to get "divided government" as an optimal choice is a fool's errand. It is such because there is only one serious party interested in doing the people's business. The other, Reeptards, are a seditionist supporting cult. A gaggle of pretenders good only for obstruction and chaos. It's a cult for Trump and determined to let him in again. This much we know: voting GOP in the next election is a vote to dismember this nation. You could as well turf your vote into a dumpster or porto-potty.
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by Joan McCarter | January 6, 2024 - 6:34am | permalink
Congress has a few immediate jobs when it returns to work next week: meeting two funding deadlines in less than a month and averting government shutdowns; coming up with a budget for both 2024 and 2025; and passing a supplemental funding package with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. All of these are intertwined, and all of them are endangered by a Republican House that seems to be hell-bent on forcing a government shutdown over the completely unrelated issue of immigration.
The government is a third of the way into the 2024 fiscal year, and none of the 12 appropriations bills that fund all the various agencies and departments have been passed and signed into law. Since the beginning of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, the government has been running on two successive continuing resolutions, the second of which has set the Jan. 19 and Feb. 2 funding deadlines. Funding for military construction and veterans programs, Agriculture and food agencies, and the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development expires first, then the State, Defense, Commerce, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, among others, last until Feb. 2.
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