House aims to vote on short-term funding bill this week to avoid government shutdown, sources say
House Republican leaders aim to bring a short-term government spending bill up for a vote by the end of this week, three sources told Fox News Digital on Monday.
The House and Senate are working toward a deal to fund the government for fiscal year 2024, which began on Oct. 1. The lack of a deal at the time prompted Congress to pass a stopgap spending bill to extend last year’s priorities, known as a continuing resolution (CR), on Sept. 30, narrowly avoiding a partial government shutdown.
That CR is due to run out on Nov. 17, and the House and Senate are still far apart on an agreement.
"The plan is to get something together we can pass this week," one of the three sources told Fox News Digital.
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The other two sources both indicated that Thursday is the likeliest day to see a vote.
Details on the length or any added measures to the CR were not immediately clear. Two of the sources suggested that plans to pass a CR would be a main topic of discussion at House Republicans’ closed-door meeting Tuesday morning.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has previously not ruled out needing another short-term bill to keep the government open while House Republicans continue to pass their 12 appropriations bills. He suggested on "Hannity" that such a move would need to come with some kind of conservative goals – but he did not elaborate on whether those would be in the form of spending cuts or policy riders.
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Johnson told Fox News Digital in an interview last week that discussions on what a CR would look like would begin "in earnest," adding, "I think, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is ensure that obviously the government remains in operation, but we do it in a fiscally responsible manner. And we cannot just print and borrow money and spend it anymore. We're past that."
Johnson had floated the idea of a "laddered" CR last week. When Congress passes one of its 12 spending bills, agencies and departments covered by that bill would be funded at that new level. Until then, they would remain at the previous year’s spending levels.
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However, two of the sources who spoke with Fox News Digital indicated that such a move is unlikely at this point.
One thing that’s shaping up to be clear is that GOP hard-liners who rebelled against ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for passing the Sept. 30 CR appear poised to give Johnson more grace.
"If Speaker Johnson comes to me and explains to me the situation, and I feel comfortable in what he's saying, then I would never say never on this go-round just because it's a different situation," Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., one of the Republicans who voted against McCarthy’s "clean" CR and later voted to oust him, told Fox News Digital late last month.
House Republicans have passed seven of 12 spending bills so far as part of a promise not to wrap all of the year's government funding priorities into one large "omnibus."