House Speaker Mike Johnson said he wants to “turn the page” on the current spending fight and shift focus to next year’s appropriations cycle ahead of a vote Thursday to keep the government open.
Congress is slated to vote on its fourth stopgap bill to avert a partial government shutdown and could put an end to the overdue appropriations process for this fiscal year. That means lawmakers would need to shift gears and focus on fiscal 2025.
Typically, Congress has already begun work on the next appropriations cycle by this part of the year, but stagnation in both chambers in passing spending bills has dragged out the process.
“What I’m very excited about … is to turn the page on FY 2024 and get immediately into FY 2025,” Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said.
He continued, “So that we’re not coming up at the end of September, the end of the fiscal year, and having to talk about, you know, [stopgaps] and omnibuses and everything, we’re gonna do everything we can to turn the aircraft carrier around.”
Heads of the House and Senate appropriations committees struck a deal Wednesday on a fourth stopgap bill and set the stage to wrap up work on the delayed spending process for the current fiscal year.
Some lawmakers have been critical of the speaker’s approach to the spending fight, arguing that it has been done behind closed doors without input from members.
Mr. Johnson defended the deal, which continued his two-step stopgap approach and teed up votes for a pair of six spending packages, arguing that when negotiations reach the late stage, usually a smaller subset of members is in the room because it’s “complicated and complex.”
“This is the way it works, every year, always has,” Mr. Johnson told reporters Thursday. “Except that we’ve instituted some new innovations. We broke the omnibus fever, right? That’s how Washington has been run for years.”
One of the goals for Republicans entering this year’s appropriations cycle was to return to regular order, which is Capitol Hill jargon for passing spending bills individually rather than turning to a massive, catchall omnibus spending bill that is thousands of pages long.
Mr. Johnson argued that by again passing a two-step stopgap bill with deadlines of March 8 and March 22, and dividing the dozen government funding bills into two, six-bill packages, it was breaking the typical spending cycle.
He noted that lawmakers would have at least 72 hours to review the spending bundles, with the first package including funding for agriculture, transportation, interior, the VA, energy and water, commerce, justice and science.
“If I did it the way that I don’t know Speaker Pelosi did, we’d just drop that bill and vote on it within hours, right?” Mr. Johnson said. “We’re not going to do that. We want members to be able to have their review and their say.”