Keeping the government open after Sunday would require Trump to sign a
bipartisan spending bill from Congress, something he had resisted
committing to for weeks. But Wednesday, with anxiety building on Capitol
Hill, he suggested that he planned to acquiesce.
The bill would fund the military and some other government programs
through September 2019 and other government operations through Dec. 7.
The House passed the legislation 361 to 61 on Wednesday and sent it to
Trump.
“We’ll keep the government open. We’re going to keep the government
open,” the president told reporters during a meeting with Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe in New York.
The bill passed Wednesday punts the fight over border-wall spending
until after the midterm elections, keeping the Department of Homeland
Security and some other agencies running at current spending levels
through early December.
It contains big spending increases for the Pentagon and the Department
of Health and Human Services for 2019. The defense spending is a win for
Trump and congressional Republicans, but without the border-wall money
Trump wanted, his support for the spending package had been in doubt.
His comments Wednesday came after he had repeatedly teased the idea of a
shutdown, at times suggesting he would not let government funding
expire and at other times suggesting he was open to doing so.
Trump called the legislation “ridiculous” in a tweet last week and
demanded to know where his wall money was. Trump repeatedly promised
during his campaign that the wall would be paid for by Mexico, but he
has recently sought $5 billion from Congress to extend construction of
the wall.
Trump had previously suggested it could be good politics to shut down
the government to fight for his border wall, but congressional GOP
leaders argued it would be a political disaster that would achieve
nothing.
The legislation passed the Senate last week and drew wide bipartisan
support in both chambers, despite complaints from some conservatives who
object to high domestic spending levels and the absence of conservative
policy priorities such as a provision blocking funding for Planned
Parenthood.
Trump’s commitment to sign the new legislation only postpones a fight over money for the border wall, however.
Some conservatives questioned whether they would be in any better
position to get Trump’s wall money after the midterm elections. It is
unclear that there is any strategy for extracting the money from
Congress at that point, because Senate Democrats would have to go along
with any such plan.
“I don’t think it’s a plan that works. I don’t see anywhere our leverage
is better to get wall funding on Dec. 7 than it is on Oct. 7,” said
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a leader of the conservative House Freedom
Caucus who talks frequently with Trump. “So at some point you have to
maintain and keep our campaign promises. And at this point I fail to see
the merits of this strategy.”
Meadows voted no on the spending bill Wednesday but said he had not
spoken with Trump about it. “I think he’s going to see what the will of
the American people is and make a decision based on that,” Meadows said.
Although congressional GOP leaders all along have asserted they expect
Trump to sign their legislation and avert a shutdown, Trump’s statements
Wednesday were his first public declaration that he would do so.
Earlier, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) had offered similar
assurances, telling reporters: “I’m confident he will sign it. . . .
This funds our military, this funds opioids, this does a lot of the
things that we all want to accomplish together, and we’ve had very good
conversations with the president.”
In March, Trump threatened at the last minute to veto an enormous
government-wide spending bill Congress had sent him for the 2018 fiscal
year.
The president ultimately signed the bill but did so reluctantly, amid a
conservative backlash over big domestic spending increases Democrats had
won in exchange for big Pentagon spending increases sought by
Republicans.
Wednesday’s legislation wraps up spending bills for the Pentagon and the
Labor, Education and Health and Human Services departments, all told
accounting for more than 60 percent of all discretionary spending.
Discretionary spending is the portion of the federal budget that
Congress doles out annually — as opposed to what are called “mandatory”
spending programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, that operate
without annual appropriations from Congress.
The full-year Pentagon and HHS spending bills for 2019 are paired with
short-term legislation keeping the entire government running through
Dec. 7.
The Pentagon budget for 2019 would be $606.5 billion under the legislation passed Wednesday — a $17 billion increase over 2018.
Funding for the Labor and Education departments and HHS would total
$178 billion, a $1 billion increase from 2018 and almost $11 billion
more than Trump requested in his budget proposal for 2019.
GOP leaders made the decision to pair Pentagon spending popular with
Republicans with health and education spending popular with Democrats
and attach it all to a short-term spending bill keeping the government
open. The result is that if Trump vetoes the short-term spending bill he
also vetoes a big increase in defense spending sought by his generals.
Even though Congress is again against a shutdown deadline without
completing work on all 12 annual must-pass spending bills, progress on
appropriations this year has been a marked improvement over years past.
If passed and signed by Trump, the defense spending bill will mark the
first time in almost a decade the Pentagon has been funded on time.
“It is a really important thing for our troops, for the sake of good
government, that for the first time in nearly a decade DOD has its money
on time,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee.
The Pentagon spending bill contains a host of provisions Thornberry
hailed as a boon to the nation’s armed forces, including $5 billion on
recruitment, $24 billion to add new ships to the nation’s fleet and
$32 billion to replace old or broken aircraft.
The Labor-HHS-Education bill also contains numerous items, some of which
are bipartisan priorities, including $39 billion for the National
Institutes of Health, a $2 billion increase from 2018; and $3.8 billion
to combat the opioid crisis, an increase of $206 million.
The short-term bill extends current funding levels for agencies
including DHS, whose 2019 budgets have not been completed by Congress.
When lawmakers return to the Capitol after the midterm elections, they
will work to finish up those other bills.
On the homeland-security bill, the major sticking point will be
reconciling the $1.6 billion provided for Trump’s border wall in the
Senate version of the bill with the $5 billion agreed to by House
Republicans. Trump wants the higher number.
