Senate appropriators begin marking up spending bills above debt ceiling caps
Emily Jacobs
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Leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee announced on Thursday that they would mark up their defense spending bill above the caps established in the debt ceiling deal earlier this summer.
News of the boosted numbers was revealed by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA), who announced her and ranking member Susan Collins‘s (R-ME) deal to add $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for nondefense emergency funds at a committee markup on Thursday.
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The move further escalates the differences between Senate appropriators and their House counterparts as both sides continue to write and pass government funding bills at different spending levels. The federal government runs out of money on Sept. 30, and the House and Senate each have fewer than 30 in-session days between now and then to find a resolution in order to prevent a government shutdown.
Murray and Collins have been marking up and advancing the 12 annual appropriations bills using spending levels agreed upon as part of President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal to avert a debt default in May. That deal caps defense spending in fiscal 2024 at $886 billion, a roughly 3% increase from current levels, and caps fiscal 2025 defense spending at $895 billion, a 1% increase.
Senators across the ideological spectrum were furious over the defense caps, which would put the Pentagon out of step with the rate of inflation and harm their overall ability to allocate adequate resources where needed. Facing a potential mutiny from defense hawks threatening to tank the agreement, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pledged to bring a supplemental defense spending bill up for a vote later in the year.
The Senate appropriators’ decision to boost defense numbers marks the first time they’ve broken with the agreed-upon spending caps.
The House Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, voted last month to adopt discretionary spending levels at $1.47 trillion for fiscal 2024, about $120 billion under the $1.59 trillion mark initially negotiated in the debt limit agreement.
McCarthy’s four-vote majority leaves him with little room for defections within his conference, though he already has upward of 20 members demanding appropriators write their 12 bills at fiscal 2022 spending levels.
Tensions over the debt limit agreement ground House business to a halt for a week in June as a group of hard-line conservatives, many of whom held up McCarthy’s bid to become speaker, insisted he recommit to a deal he cut in January to pursue deep spending cuts.
The speaker acquiesced in order to lift their blockade on floor votes, putting the two chambers fundamentally at odds.
Asked by the Washington Examiner last Monday about the situation, Collins expressed optimism that there would be enough time for the bills to go through a conference committee, where House and Senate bills are sent to work through differences.
“I’m focused on getting our Senate bills done and working in a bipartisan way with Chair Murray to do that,” Collins said. “The House is going to do what the House is going to do. Ultimately, I would anticipate we’ll come together and do a conference committee the way we used to in the good old days.”
“We’ve got enough work to do over here without my trying to figure out what the House is going to do step by step. In the end, we’re going to have to come together,” she continued, going on to acknowledge concerns about timelines by noting that “it’s clearly going to be tight.”
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Collins pointed out to reporters last Tuesday that it is “not unusual [for] the House and Senate to produce bills that have different provisions,” adding that she still hopes to have a “normal appropriations process.”
She also reiterated her desire for Schumer to bring the appropriations bills the committee has already passed to the floor for a vote, as he promised he would when the debt ceiling deal was reached. Collins expressed confidence that he would “keep that agreement.”