9 months ago
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The House and Senate finished work for the week Thursday afternoon, no doubt traipsing off to finalize plans for the six-week stretch of August recess. They should plan to rest up during those weeks because September is going to be fraught in light of what leaders in each chamber decided to do this week. The Senate’s top appropriators added $13.7 billion of government funding above the limits President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to in the deal they made to resolve the last debt ceiling crisis. House leaders, who’ve been whittling down that number to appease hard-liners, slashed it even further.
The top two Senate appropriators, Democrat Patty Murray and Republican Susan Collins, announced in a committee meeting Thursday that they had agreed to “add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense, and $5.7 billion for non-defense spread across 4 subcommittees.” Those four are Homeland Security; Labor, Health and Human Services and Education; State and Foreign Operations; and Commerce, Justice, and Science. “Members on both sides of the aisle—on and off committee—have voiced serious, bipartisan concerns about the cuts in the debt ceiling deal to vital non-defense programs and the caps it imposes on defense spending,” Murray said in announcing the increases.
