The lame-duck Congress faces a government shutdown deadline in just over a month, meaning that lawmakers will need to fund federal agencies into the new year. House Speaker Mike Johnson indicated Sunday that he prefers a three-month stopgap the pushes off a fight over full-year spending until March — even as House and Senate appropriators and other leaders would rather reach a deal this year.
“We’re running out of clock. December 20 is the deadline.,” Johnson said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” He expressed hope that a full-year deal might still be reached but also suggested that a temporary measure would allow President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming Republican-led House and Senate more say over the spending plans for fiscal year 2025.
“That would be, ultimately a good move because the country would benefit from it — because then you’d have Republican control, and we’d have a little more say in what those spending bills are,” Johnson told Fox’s Shannon Bream. “But the new reform agenda begins in earnest as soon as President Donald J. Trump takes the office in January, and we have a full agenda to run.”
That timing would avoid any potential end-of-year infighting among Republicans, though it would also carry a risk that the appropriations process could delay or derail portions of Trump’s agenda for his first months in office.
Democrats reportedly want to finish the full-year funding bills this year, when they still have control of the Senate, and some Republican lawmakers argue that the new administration shouldn’t have to be burdened with a leftover spending fight — or that agencies shouldn’t have to operate on temporary extensions of past funding levels. Still, any effort to finish the appropriations process this year would be complicated; the two parties still don’t have a “topline” agreement on spending levels for the year.
“I think we can get a deal, and I think it’s really important that we let the new administration have a clean slate and not be worrying about” the spending bills,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriation Committee, told NBC News.
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