Congress Churns Through FY 2024 Appropriations

Congress is officially halfway through its to-do list for fiscal year (FY) 2024 spending bills after President Biden signed a six-bill “minibus” package last week. Appropriators will now turn their attention to the remaining six funding measures — including Defense, Homeland Security, Financial Services and General Government (FSGG), Labor-HHS-Education, State and Foreign Operations, and Legislative Branch — prior to the March 22 deadline. However, appropriators are still negotiating through some of the more delicate policy disagreements within this next tranche of bills, notably within both Labor-HHS-Education and Homeland Security. As such, timing for the release of the remaining appropriations bills is unclear as of now.

• Situational awareness. Government funding is expected to eat up significant bandwidth among lawmakers in the coming weeks and months ahead, especially given the fact that Congress is well behind on work for FY 2025. Of note, President Biden’s FY 2025 budget request will be formally released later today, and several Biden administration officials are scheduled to testify on the budget starting this week.

— THIS WEEK IN CONGRESS. Both chambers will be back in session later this afternoon. In the House, lawmakers are slated to consider 11 suspension bills out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Notable measures up for consideration today would: (1) extend the Disaster Unemployment Assistance benefits for an additional 30 days (S. 1858); (2) allow the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to offer grants to public-private partnerships for broadband projects (H.R. 1752); and (3) extend funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) marine debris cleanup program (H.R. 886). Later in the week, House lawmakers will take up a bipartisan bill that would force ByteDance — the Chinese parent company of the social media app TikTok — to divest its ownership of the app within 165 days of enactment or face a ban in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Senate will pick up consideration of pending judicial nominations.