US lawmakers unveil huge spending bill to avoid govt shutdown

Top lawmakers on Tuesday unveiled a sprawling spending package that would keep the government open through next fall after reaching a compromise on billions of dollars in federal spending, including more emergency aid to Ukraine.

The legislation would increase federal spending from the last fiscal year, providing $858 billion in military spending and more than $772 billion for domestic programs for the remainder of the fiscal year that ends in September, according to a summary released by Senate Democrats. With Republican support needed for the measure to pass the Senate, Democrats bowed to conservative opposition to approving a larger increase that would have kept funding levels equal for health, education and other domestic programs that President Joe Biden and his party have prioritized.

The release of the legislation came around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, days before a midnight Friday deadline to fund the government or face a shutdown, after lawmakers passed a one-week stopgap funding bill last week to give themselves more time to discuss the bigger spending package.

The measure is the last opportunity for Democrats to shape the federal budget while their party controls both chambers of Congress and for several retiring lawmakers to push a final round of pet projects into law. With Republicans set to take control of the House — and vowing to force deep spending cuts — lawmakers in both parties were eager to finish the compromise and remove one possible threat of political brinkmanship.

“The choice is clear: We can either do our jobs and fund the government, or we can abandon our responsibilities without a real path forward,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, calling the bill “undoubtedly in the interest of the American people” in a statement early Tuesday.

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Given that the 4,155-page package is the final, must-pass legislation for this Congress, lawmakers stuffed it with dozens of funding priorities and unrelated bipartisan measures. That included an overhaul of the electoral vote-counting law that former President Donald Trump tried to use to overturn the 2020 election and a ban on the Chinese-owned app TikTok on government devices.

The package also includes earmarks, rebranded for a second consecutive year as community project funding, that allow lawmakers to divert some money to specific projects in their districts and states. It also provides the funding needed to fulfill policy changes outlined in bipartisan legislation that became law this Congress, including a bill aimed at bolstering U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

The release of the legislation was delayed Monday in part by a prolonged tussle between lawmakers from Virginia and Maryland over criteria that will determine a new location for the FBI headquarters, according to four people briefed on the negotiations.

The two states — backed by senior Democrats such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia — have been in a long-running battle to be the home of the FBI as it plans to move from downtown Washington into the suburbs. After frenzied negotiations, the two delegations agreed to language requiring the government to have detailed consultations with teams from both states before picking a site, a Senate Democratic aide said.

The package, which provides roughly $1.7 trillion to keep the government funded, also sets aside billions of dollars more for emergency aid, including more than $40 billion for Ukraine, more than the $37.7 billion the White House requested. It also provides about $40 billion to help communities across the country recover from hurricanes, wildfires and droughts in the past year.

The legislation includes plans intended to improve the nation’s response to future pandemics, though lawmakers did not include a proposal to create an independent panel to investigate the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

In their effort to secure at least 10 Republican votes to avoid a filibuster, Democrats were forced to abandon a number of priorities, including reviving lapsed expanded payments to most families with children, emergency aid to counter the toll of the coronavirus pandemic and a bid to lift the cap on the nation’s borrowing limit before an expected deadline next year.

Republicans — led by Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and Richard Shelby of Alabama, the vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee — emphasized their success in negotiating more funding for the military, as some conservatives balked at the overall spending increase and lamented that they could have had a stronger negotiating hand had party leaders waited until they controlled the House.

“Republicans’ position all along was quite simple: defending America and outcompeting our rivals is a fundamental governing duty,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “It’s the basic business that we’re supposed to take care of, not something for which Democrats get special rewards, and that is precisely what is finally happening.”

Democrats, who muscled through more than $2 trillion over unanimous Republican opposition earlier this congressional session, in turn spoke of their success in shoring up some health care, veterans assistance, housing and food programs and protecting other domestic funding priorities, even as they acknowledged that several of their initiatives had to be curtailed or left out.

“This funding bill is overflowing with very good news for our troops, for the Ukrainian brave fighters, for American jobs, for our families and for American democracy,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday morning. He urged senators to take up the bill quickly in the coming days.

“It’s not everything we would have wanted, of course,” Schumer said. “When you’re dealing in a bipartisan, bicameral way, you have to sit down and get it down, and that means each side has to concede some things. But it is something that we can be very proud of.”

The measure would also bar TikTok, which is a subsidiary of the Chinese company ByteDance, from government devices, though some federal agencies already ban the app. Another proposal in the bill would raise the fees that corporations pay when they notify government regulators of large mergers and acquisitions, which supporters say will give needed resources to strapped antitrust regulators as they increase their scrutiny of companies across the economy.

The package also includes a collection of new rules that would make it easier for many Americans trying to save and pay for retirement. One provision would help lower- and middle-income earners saving for retirement by making changes to an existing tax credit, called the saver’s credit, that is currently available only to those who have income tax liability. In its new form, it would become a matching contribution from the federal government that is deposited to taxpayers’ retirement accounts regardless of whether they have income tax liability.

Workers ages 60-63 would also be permitted to set aside extra money for retirement. And, starting next year, retirees would be permitted to delay taking minimum withdrawals from their retirement accounts until age 73, before increasing to age 75 in 2033.

The legislation includes a number of health care proposals, such as making permanent a plan established in the $1.9 trillion stimulus law that allows women to remain enrolled in Medicaid for a full year after giving birth.

But it is also set to end the continuous coverage that millions of Medicaid recipients have had since March 2020, a policy guaranteed by the federal public health emergency declaration, which is expected to wind down next year. The omnibus bill allows states to begin removing people from Medicaid on April 1, regardless of when the emergency declaration is lifted.

It strengthens Medicaid benefits for some recipients, providing five years of funding for Medicaid in Puerto Rico and permanent funding for coverage in other U.S. territories. The bill also offers other protections for Medicaid recipients, ensuring that children in the program and the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program receive a year of continuous coverage after enrollment.

It would also require Medicare to pay for telemedicine visits with doctors for two more years, extending a popular policy that has been allowed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. And it ensures another round of funding for the Indian Health Service for the next fiscal year for the first time, giving the agency some budgetary certainty.

The package includes Food and Drug Administration provisions that would give the agency new authority to track and regulate cosmetics. It also includes reforms related to infant formula supply, in response to a shortage this year that left families struggling to feed their babies. It calls for the FDA to meet with other countries about aligning infant formula oversight standards, for Congress to receive notice of new formula recalls and for the development of a national strategy to ensure that families have the infant formula they need.