The House will begin to consider the first of its annual appropriations bills next week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told reporters on Monday.
The House Appropriations Committee has approved eight of the 12 spending bills it must pass each year to fund the government, teeing them up for a vote by the full chamber.
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Amendments are now being accepted for a number of those measures, which McCarthy identified as the bills for defense, military construction, and the Agriculture Department.
“Those will be the first to come to the floor, but we want people to have plenty of time to offer more amendments,” he said at a Monday press conference.
House appropriators have been marking up bills below the spending levels set in the compromise McCarthy reached with President Joe Biden to avert a default earlier this year.
The two leaders in effect agreed to freeze spending at fiscal 2023 levels, but an uprising by the conservative Freedom Caucus, which holds outsize power in the Republican-controlled House, forced McCarthy to pursue an additional $120 billion in cuts.
The decision, while it temporarily defused tensions within his conference, set McCarthy on a collision course with the Democratic-led Senate, which plans to pass its own bills at the levels agreed to in the debt limit deal.
The speaker told reporters he was encouraged by the Senate's decision to work through the bills one by one, a departure from years of top-down omnibuses passed in a hurry before the Christmas recess.
But he warned the upper chamber that appropriators must stick to regular order with fewer than 20 legislative days left to fund the government.
“I do want to remind the Senate — I will not put an omnibus on the floor of the House," he said.
The short time frame raises questions about whether Congress can pass all 12 bills before Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. Asked if lawmakers would need to resort to a continuing resolution to buy more time, McCarthy balked, offering reporters what has become a familiar retort — that he was being underestimated.
“We will get our bills passed, like I said we will — this is a new Congress with new leadership," he said.
McCarthy downplayed the influence the Freedom Caucus has had in the appropriations process, insisting that the turbulent passage of the debt ceiling deal and, most recently, the National Defense Authorization Act, was simply a byproduct of the House giving rank-and-file members and, by extension, their constituents a say in the process.
“The most important thing is not the Freedom Caucus; it’s America,” he said.
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The Senate Appropriations Committee plans to take up three of its spending bills this week as it eyes finishing most or all of them before the August recess. It approved three on Thursday, the same day House appropriators finished their bill for Financial Services.
“We have a job to do. So, here in the Senate, we are moving ahead,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “We are making clear the Senate is focused on writing serious bills that can actually be signed into law and doing the most we possibly can for the people back home.”