Senate Majority Leader John Thune says Congress will need a short-term spending bill to prevent a shutdown Oct. 1, with leadership allies likely to push for a patch running up until the holidays.
The South Dakota Republican’s comments in an interview Wednesday reveal how Republicans are already thinking about their strategy for the fall funding fight, with Thune in particular expected to face divisions within his own party about what to do.
And while Thune acknowledged that Republicans tasked with writing the funding bills will want a short-term stopgap, some GOP hardliners are already pushing for a year-long measure that just extends current funding levels — something Thune cautioned is “never … a very good solution.”
“It locks in spending from the last year,” he said. “You don’t get a chance to make judgments or decisions.”
Thune’s goal, instead, is to get as many of the 12 annual funding bills as possible signed into law by Oct. 1, and then use a more limited stopgap measure to temporarily cover the rest of the federal government. The Senate is moving its first tranche of funding bills this week, and Thune said he wanted to pass another three or four in September, which would let the chamber bless at least half of the dozen appropriations measures in time for the shutdown deadline.
But Thune will need to negotiate not only with his own members but also Republicans in the House, where appropriators are drafting bills that make deeper cuts than many of those being written in the Senate.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), in a separate interview Wednesday, suggested the House and Senate could use the August recess to discuss resolving differences in their funding measures: “We want to try to get a negotiated appropriations process. And we still have that ability.”
Scalise also agreed with Thune that a stopgap funding bill would not be “ideal,” as it would keep the previous administration’s policies in place and also would be “bad for defense.”
Hanging over it all is the White House’s push to send another request to claw back funding. A White House aide said this week that Congress could soon receive a request to greenlight cuts to education programs. Thune said he hasn’t yet had conversations with the White House about what should be in that second rescissions package and hasn’t “had a lot of visibility into it other than kind of general categories.”
Senate Democrats are still working out their own shutdown strategy, and many of them are warning that Republicans shouldn’t bank on Democratic support for a government funding bill this fall if Republicans continue to pursue party-line spending tactics. Some Democrats say they should make their support for a government funding bill conditional on Republicans promising not to vote on any more rescissions bills.
Thune, however, said Wednesday that he “can’t, probably, guarantee that.”
He also sidestepped whether he believed White House budget director Russ Vought should wait until after the government funding deadline to send over another claw-back request, but added: “I just want to see us have an appropriations process.”
Meredith Lee Hill contributed reporting.
