Congressional leaders are closing in on a deal to fund the government into early next year, along with tens of billions of dollars in disaster aid, as they work to avoid a holiday shutdown.
The burgeoning agreement comes after weeks of House and Senate leadership negotiations, which included top appropriators, ahead of the Dec. 20 deadline. Text of the funding bill is expected over the weekend or early next week to allow both chambers to pass the measure before lawmakers leave town until January.
“We’re making good progress,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said Thursday afternoon.
“It’s the final phases in negotiation, and something can always go wrong,” Cole said Wednesday night. “I know when people are working in good faith and trying to get to a common point. And I would say that’s happening both across the rotunda and across the partisan divide.”
The spending patch is expected to fund the government into March.
Lawmakers have been privately haggling over the details of a disaster aid package that is expected to be included in the bill, following the White House’s request last month for more than $98 billion in emergency funding to aid recovery from hurricanes Helene and Milton, as well as other disasters throughout the country.
Some Republican lawmakers have predicted that the disaster aid will total less than the White House’s request, but not dramatically. There is broad acknowledgment that the emergency funding within the package will not be offset by funding cuts to other accounts, despite deficit hawk concerns.
The decision to fund the government into March comes after some Senate Republicans had pushed for an earlier deadline, arguing it would help clear the deck for Republicans to focus instead on using the reconciliation process to skirt the Senate filibuster to pass priorities like energy policy and tax cuts.
GOP appropriators and some members of leadership had also initially hoped to wrap up government funding until Oct. 1 as part of a sweeping year-end spending deal, but those aspirations quickly died after Donald Trump’s election win. Washington quickly recalibrated so that Trump could put his stamp on the larger spending package early next year. A spending deal also would have sparked a likely challenge to Mike Johnson’s speakership.
