A budget deal looms on the horizon as Congress tries to come up with a compromise before a government shutdown. The House Appropriations Committee suggested a short-term resolution in order to give them more time to come up with a permanent (or more permanent) budget solution. The proposal would give leaders until at least December 16 to put a budget in place before federal employees face another potential shutdown.
Congress Has Time
The Office of Management and Budget representative told reporters “There is enough time for Congress to prevent a lapse in appropriations. However, at this time, prudent management requires that the government plan for the possibility of a lapse and OMB is working with agencies to take appropriate action…. It is our hope that this work will ultimately be unnecessary and that there will be no lapse in appropriations.”
Government officials said earlier that they would work hard to ensure that the federal employees did not face a shutdown, but urged lawmakers to step away from bickering and work out a deal. The White House Press Secretary told reporters that the White House was willing to work with lawmakers to prevent a government shutdown.
Secretary Josh Earnest said, “We have been clear that if members of Congress needed an extra day or two in order to pass legislation, that the President would ensure the government didn’t shut down while they were going through the legislative mechanics or a passing a bipartisan budget agreement.”
Earnest continued by telling reporters that some parties are making it more difficult to pass the necessary bills.
“Congress has had ample time to negotiate, and the only thing that is blocking negotiations right now is the insistence on the part of Republicans to use the budgetary process to advance their stalled ideological agenda. I am hopeful, before we reach the deadline, that Republican will abandon that strategy.”
This Bill is Essential
Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, told reporters that the short-term spending bill was essential to allow Congress to iron out the spending bill, which totals just over $1 trillion. “We need to get it right. I don’t want us to go home until we get this done.”
The government faced a shutdown at the end of September for the same bill. However, lawmakers were able to delay the shutdown with a deal that provided an operation budget through this week.
Representatives for federal employees spoke out against the government waffling and urged leaders to do right by federal employees.
“Federal employees deserve better than this. American taxpayers deserve better than this,’ National Federation of Federal Employees president William Dougan said. “Putting federal government jobs into funding-limo every few weeks is no way to carry out the business of the American people, and it places an extraordinary amount of financial stress on hundreds of thousands of families across the nation.”
The last government shutdown in 2013 lasted for 16 days and totaled millions of missed days or work and millions of dollars in lost revenue. Following the last shutdown an OBM analysis indicated that a total of 6.6 million days of work were lost and the shutdown cost some $2.5 billion in lost pay and benefits. Nearly 900,000 employees were furloughed in 2013.
