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The short-term funding bill would keep the government running until Oct. 31 and trigger a 1 percent cut to current fiscal levels, according to the plan released just before lawmakers were briefed Sunday evening.
The 1 percent cut is an average for the federal budget. The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs would not receive any cuts, while other government agencies would have their budgets slashed by 8 percent until the end of October.
The effort is meant to garner support from hard-right lawmakers who demanded significant cuts to support a short-term funding extension.
The short-term extension would include a border security bill that House Republicans passed through their narrow ranks earlier this year but would leave out a divisive policy on verifying workers’ immigration status. The plan also includes provisions on the border that will be added to the Homeland Security appropriations bill in an effort to extract concessions from the Senate on the issue when both chambers negotiate on funding the government for a full fiscal year.
Missing from the proposal are requests from President Biden for more than $20 billion in aid for Ukraine and $16 billion in disaster relief. Both Democratic and Republican Senate leaders have said they would tack money for those matters on to any short-term funding bill.
Striking an apparent deal is a significant, albeit small, step for the House Republican Conference, whose leaders must now gather enough support for the measure to pass and fulfill a request by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to show a united conservative front ahead of inevitable negotiations with the Senate.
While many involved in the deal are telegraphing that these parameters should ensure that the bill gets the necessary 218 Republican votes to pass, vocal lawmakers initially panned the development. Several of the conservative demands are also likely to be rejected by the Senate, pitting both chambers against each other with less than a dozen days to spare to prevent a partial government shutdown.
The proposal was not negotiated by leadership. Instead, six House Republican members from two of the five ideological factions — Reps. Dusty Johnson (S.D.), Stephanie I. Bice (Okla.) and Kelly Armstrong (N.D.) from the pragmatic Main Street Caucus; and Reps. Scott Perry (Pa.), Chip Roy (Tex.) and Byron Donalds (Fla.) from the Freedom Caucus — initially met for 2½ hours Wednesday night to hash out parameters of a potential agreement after far-right lawmakers prevented a floor vote funding the Defense Department until demands were met.
“House Freedom Caucus members have worked over the weekend with the Main Street Caucus on a path forward to fund the government and secure America’s border,” Perry said in a statement Sunday. “We now have a framework for our colleagues across the House Republican Conference.”
Earlier on Sunday morning, McCarthy said that he would bring the proposal “to the floor, win or lose.”
“I’ve been through shutdowns, and I’ve never seen somebody win a shutdown. ’Cause when you shut down, you give all your power to the administration,” McCarthy said on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News Channel. “How are you going to win your arguments to secure the border if the border agents don’t get paid?”
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