WASHINGTON _ Disputes over potential add-ons were holding up a deal Monday on a monthlong stopgap funding measure needed to avoid a partial government shutdown starting Thursday at midnight.
The continuing resolution is expected to keep the government open through Dec. 20 and fund agencies mostly at their current spending rates held over from fiscal 2019. But House Democrats want exemptions and policy riders in the CR that the White House and Republicans argue instead should be dealt with in a fiscal 2020 wrap-up as soon as next month.
"We expect a clean CR without provisions that can be dealt with in the regular appropriations process, which we continue to work in earnest," a senior administration official said.
Provisions that House Democrats were pushing included extra money for the 2020 census, equal to the $7.6 billion rate of spending for the Census Bureau approved by the Senate late last month.
Democrats also want to include funding to support a 3.1% military pay raise, and to block a provision of the 2015 highway authorization law that would automatically cut $7.6 billion in formula funding for the states on July 1, 2020.
According to sources familiar with the talks, the census funding and transportation rescission were causing problems with some Republicans. But it seemed likely that at minimum the military pay provision would be included as well as the higher rate of census spending.
The measure was also expected to extend numerous expiring health care programs that were temporarily renewed in the most recent stopgap law, such as funding for community health centers and teaching hospitals, as well other miscellaneous programs ranging from the higher education reauthorization law to the Export-Import Bank.
The House and Senate are expected to vote on the stopgap measure this week before the current funding bill expires Thursday. White House officials have indicated several times that President Donald Trump supports the bill, though the president himself hasn't said so.
"The President will sign a clean continuing resolution that lasts through December 20th while the administration and Congress continue to discuss a path forward for full-year spending bills, and we are hopeful that Congress will not add ideas which could complicate the chances of him signing a CR by Thursday night," White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland said in a statement.
Congressional leaders and the White House reached agreement in July to budget $738 billion for defense-related appropriations and $632 billion for nondefense programs during fiscal 2020. But Republicans and Democrats have not yet agreed how to divide up the funding, particularly on the nondefense side, which includes border security and veterans programs as well as everything from low-income housing to environmental protection to biomedical research.
Negotiators have been trading offers frequently during the past two weeks and appeared close to an agreement on the subcommittee allocations, known as 302(b)s, following a meeting Thursday between Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita M. Lowey, Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Lowey, D-N.Y. said after that meeting she expected an agreement could be reached before Wednesday, Nov. 20.
If lawmakers can stick to that timeline, it'll give subcommittees about three weeks, including the one-week Thanksgiving break, to broker agreements on spending levels and policies within their bills.
Those negotiations will include debates on border wall spending and whether the president should keep the ability to transfer certain funds to border wall construction, the two issues most likely to lead to a stalemate and another shutdown.
Democrats have drawn a hard line on that issue for most of the year with Pelosi, D-Calif., saying Sunday she doesn't believe Trump is "serious" about border wall funding.
"We have well over a trillion dollars worth of decisions to make. I don't know why we would go to that," Pelosi said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"I think that his comments about the wall are really an applause line at a rally, but they're not anything that he's serious about," she continued.
Lawmakers will also need to reconcile dozens of policy differences between the House and Senate bills that have nothing do with the border wall.
House Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said Friday that he expects most, but not all, of the appropriations bills can become law before Congress leaves town for the December holidays.
"When you take out the week for Thanksgiving, you've essentially got three weeks when you get back," Simpson said. "If we put our heads to it, I think, we could negotiate most of them. I wouldn't say all of them."
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, chairwoman of the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee, said it's possible to get final agreement on that bill before Dec. 20.
"We could move quickly because they do not want to go beyond Dec. 20 and it looks like they do not want to shut the government down. But obviously, the 302(b)s ... that's the solid piece we need to know right now and then go from there," DeLauro said.
The Connecticut Democrat said she plans to "fight very, very hard" in the final bargaining to keep $50 million for gun violence research the House approved this summer.
One way of getting around tight budget limits that could accommodate both parties' priorities is to designate some portion of the $8.9 billion sought by the Department of Veterans Affairs for private medical care programs as an emergency. Those accounts became the responsibility of appropriators in a 2018 law, and meeting the needs without an exemption would mean sacrifices, potentially, in other veterans programs.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer suggested Friday that House lawmakers might want to hold off on scheduling their Christmas travel plans for the time being.
"I would advise members on both sides of the aisle not to schedule any business outside of Washington, D.C. between the 16th and the 20th," Hoyer, D-Md., said in his weekly floor colloquy. "And I would advise them further, if in fact we do not fund government by the 20th, they may well be here longer than that."
