Johnson Signals Plan for Looming Shutdown Deadline

Johnson Signals Plan for Looming Shutdown Deadline

Biden yesterday at the Museu da Amazonia in Manaus, Brazil, as he attends the G20 Summit.
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Monday, November 18, 2024

Good evening! President-elect Donald Trump announced today that he’s nominating former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy to be transportation secretary, but Trump has yet to name his pick for the Treasury Department, as jockeying for that post has reportedly intensified.

Here’s what else is happening.

Biden Requests $98 Billion for Disaster Relief

President Joe Biden on Monday asked Congress to provide $98.4 billion in emergency funding in response to a host of natural disasters, including Hurricanes Helene and Milton this past fall.

The funds would flow to 16 federal agencies, with the majority going to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Agriculture Department. In addition to the recent hurricanes in the Southeast, the emergency funds would aid the federal response to the wildfires in Maui, tornadoes in the Midwest and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Biden called on lawmakers to act without delay. “I urge the Congress to act quickly to pass a supplemental funding package to assist communities impacted by these hurricanes — and every other disaster since the Congress last passed a comprehensive disaster package in 2022 — so that the people, families, businesses, and communities affected have the support they need to respond, recover, and rebuild responsibly.”

The specific requests include $40 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund, which Biden said is at risk. “Without additional funding, the DRF will face a shortfall this fiscal year, which will impact FEMA’s ability to provide life-saving and life-sustaining assistance to disaster survivors, as well as slow recovery from ongoing and prior disasters,” Biden wrote.

Per Jennifer Shutt of States Newsroom, other requests include:

* $24 billion for the Department of Agriculture to aid farmers who were victims of recent disasters, boost pay for wildland firefighters in the U.S. Forest Service, and enhance the emergency response of federal food programs;

* $12 billion for Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery programs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development;

* $8 billion for road and bridge repair through the Department of Transportation;

* $4 billion for cleanup and water system upgrades overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency;

* $ 3 billion for the Health and Human Services Department, which would be used in part to build up supply chains for medical products;

* $2 billion for low-interest loans administered by the Small Business Administration;

* $2 billion for economic grants administered by the Commerce Department, as well as three new airplanes used for weather research;

* $1 billion for the Education Department to assist schools in areas hit by disasters;

* $1 billion for the Energy Department to rebuild and enhance electrical grids in areas hit by hurricanes and the Maui fire;

* $500 million to reimburse the Army Corps of Engineers for its work on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

A record-breaking year: FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters Monday that the agency had responded to 172 natural disasters so far in 2024, far more than the 114 disasters in 2023. “Hurricane Beryl became the earliest Category 5 storm to form in the Atlantic and Hurricane Helene has devastated six states,” Criswell said. “We saw the second-busiest spring tornado season ever recorded. And we've seen, overall, a 50% increase in disaster activity.”

A tight schedule: There are just a few weeks left in the calendar year for Congress to act on an emergency funding package, but there is widespread agreement on the need to move quickly. Multiple committees will hold hearings this week to review funding needs and the response to recent disasters by FEMA. After the Thanksgiving break, lawmakers will need to decide on how to address the supplemental spending request, with options including a standalone bill and folding the funding into a larger year-end spending package.

Johnson Signals He’ll Look to Push Funding Fight Into 2025

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.

Ramaswamy Says Some Federal Agencies Could Be ‘Deleted Outright’

Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who has been selected by President-elect Donald Trump to co-lead a new and as-yet undefined “Department of Government Efficiency” tasked with slashing federal spending, said this weekend that some government agencies could be “deleted outright” under the incoming administration.

In an interview that aired this weekend, Ramaswamy told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network that the proposed reductions could be extensive. “We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated,” he said.

Ramaswamy, who is poised to run the efficiency effort with tech billionaire Elon Musk, singled out federal contractors “and others who are overbilling the federal government” as potential targets. “I think people will be surprised by, I think, how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” he said.

It’s not clear, however, how the efficiency effort, known as DOGE, will function, or what kind of authority it will have to enact changes. And despite talk about eliminating wasteful agencies and slashing federal employment levels, The Wall Street Journal points out that most federal employment is related to defense and security — areas that may be difficult to cut for both practical and political reasons. The agency with the highest number of civilian workers is Veterans Affairs, which employs 486,522 people. The much-derided Department of Education, on the other end of the scale, employs just 4,425 people.

The chart below from the Journal shows a breakdown of the roughly 2.3 million civilian employees of the federal government, who make up less than 2% of the overall U.S. workforce and whose annual payroll cost was about $213 billion as of March 2024.

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Quote of the Day

“I don’t think that passing just an extension of tax cuts that shows on paper an increase in the deficit [is] going to be challenging. … But the other side of the coin is, you start to add things to reduce the deficit, and that gets politically more challenging.”

− An unnamed Republican tax adviser, quoted in a Washington Post article in which Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein and Dan Diamond report that President-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers have had preliminary discussions with congressional Republicans “about making significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal safety net programs to offset the enormous cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts next year.”

Extending the expiring portions of the 2017 tax cuts would add some $4 trillion or more to the national debt over 10 years, and Trump campaigned on promises of a host of other tax cuts that would cost trillions of dollars more, so Republicans are hunting for ways to offset the lost revenue. They have reportedly discussed new work requirements and spending caps for safety net programs — though some in the party are worried about how such cuts would play out politically.

“Some of them are looking at Medicaid and food stamps. When you talk about spending, that is the place they immediately go,” one Republican policy adviser told the Post. “But I’m not sure they want the headlines about paying for tax cuts by cutting those programs.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.

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