Speaker Johnson announces topline spending deal to avoid government shutdown
Congressional leaders have reached a topline spending deal to fund the federal government for the rest of 2024.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the deal reached with the Senate and the White House in a “Dear Colleague” letter to members on Sunday.
“The topline constitutes $1.590 trillion for FY24 – the statutory levels of the Fiscal Responsibility Act. That includes $886 billion for defense and $704 billion for nondefense,” Johnson said in the letter.
The deal comes as both the House and Senate are set to return from a holiday break this week ahead of a two-tiered government funding deadline, with the first batch of funding expiring on Jan. 19 and the rest expiring on Feb. 2.
The two chambers had been far apart in how they had marked up regular spending bills, with the House passing bills below FRA levels and the Senate marking up bills above FRA levels. With a topline agreement, the two chambers can work to reconcile those differences in the underlying legislation and pass appropriations before the funding deadlines.
House Republicans have squabbled for months over topline spending deals, with hardline conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus recently accusing GOP leadership of entertaining a deal that would “obscure the actual spending numbers with more shady side deals and accounting tricks.”
Johnson addressed those concerns in his letter.
“As has been widely reported, a list of extra-statutory adjustments was agreed upon by negotiators last summer. The agreement today achieves key modifications to the June framework that will secure more than $16 billion in additional spending cuts to offset the discretionary spending levels,” Johnson said.
The Speaker, though, touted that the spending deal “results in an overall $30 billion total reduction from the Senate’s spending plans.”
Johnson said that there will be an additional $10 billion in cuts to the IRS mandatory funding, bringing the total to $20 billion, and that $6.1 billion will be cut from “the Biden’s Administration’s continued COVID-era slush funds.”
“While these final spending levels will not satisfy everyone, and they do not cut as much spending as many of us would like, this deal does provide us a path to: 1) move the process forward; 2) reprioritize funding within the topline towards conservative objectives, instead of last year’s Schumer-Pelosi omnibus; and 3) fight for the important policy riders included in our House FY24 bills,” Johnson said.
This is a developing story.