Conservatives in the House are not happy with a new budget deal that Speaker Johnson struck with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown later this month.
The deal was announced yesterday and, according to the Freedom Caucus, it spends 1.658 trillion.
Here’s more from Fox News:
Republican hardliners in the House of Representatives are pushing back against the bipartisan deal struck on Sunday aimed at avoiding a government shutdown.
The conservative House Freedom Caucus led the revolt against Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s agreement on Sunday evening, recirculating a late December memo that said any funding topline higher than $1.59 trillion would be “totally unacceptable.”
“It’s even worse than we thought,” the group posted on X. “Don’t believe the spin. Once you break through typical Washington math, the true total programmatic spending level is $1.658 trillion — not $1.59 trillion.”
The statement called the deal a “total failure.”
Previous GOP rebellions in the spending fight have seen conservative lawmakers intentionally tank their own party’s procedural votes, effectively delaying government funding bills from getting to the floor.
But Congress is working on a major time crunch, with federal funding expiring for some agencies on Jan. 19 and all others on Feb. 2.
They’re also operating on a two-seat majority for most of this month, after Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., announced Friday that he would be recovering from cancer-related treatment for most of January.
That means House leadership will likely have to put any spending bills up under suspension, which would bypass the procedural hurdle but raise the threshold for passage to two-thirds of the chamber rather than a simple majority.
It’s all but assured that any final appropriations bills will need Democratic support to pass the House.
Johnson and Schumer, D-N.Y., both claimed victory when announcing they had agreed on what level to fund the government at for the remainder of fiscal year 2024. Their plan would set a statutory topline of $1.59 trillion, the same level Schumer set with ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as part of negotiations to raise the debt limit last spring.
The updated plan would also factor in most of a $69 billion side deal made between McCarthy and President Biden. Johnson said he negotiated an added $16 billion in spending cuts this year to offset that.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, on X called the agreed-upon spending level “terrible,” adding that it “gives away the leverage accomplished in the (already not great) caps deal” between McCarthy and Biden, the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
Below is more detail on the deal from Daniel Horowitz:
Over the weekend, Johnson made a deal with the White House to pass a budget for the remainder of fiscal year 2024 along the lines of the 2023 debt ceiling agreement. The deal will allocate $886.3 billion for defense and $772.7 billion for nondefense programs, for a total of $1.658 trillion in discretionary spending. The agreement locks in an additional $69 billion in nondefense spending McCarthy accepted in a “side deal” with the White House in May that was not written into the law suspending the debt ceiling.
Johnson is using the oldest trick in the book to sell his conference on the deal by claiming he is cutting spending to offset the agreement top-lines, avoiding automatic scheduled cuts. But the trouble is that the spending cuts are actually “rescissions” that claw back $6.1 billion in unspent pandemic aid and $20.2 billion in IRS funding. That’s money that wasn’t needed anyway — and we could have secured those savings for free.
Following the principles of “Art of the Deal,” Democrats appropriated ungodly sums of money for 80,000 IRS agents in the 2022 Green New Deal bill, knowing it would be impossible to hire so many IRS workers even their wildest dreams. This gave them ample negotiating room to “give in” on new spending while still expanding the IRS to alarming levels. Ditto for the original sums of pandemic cash.
With interest on the debt now approaching $1.1 trillion a year and the Treasury Department slated to conduct more bond auctions than ever before, Johnson’s deal is the debt crisis equivalent of spitting in an ocean. Which is likely why our good friend Mitch McConnell was quick to praise the deal.
Sounds like Johnson is no different than McCarthy when it comes to selling out. As Horowitz pointed out earlier in his piece, Johnson made clear to Democrats he wanted to avoid a government shutdown at all costs and thus gave away all of his leverage when he did that.