House GOP eyes ambitious plans to pass all 12 government funding bills
House Republicans are plotting an ambitious schedule to pass all 12 annual government funding bills for fiscal 2025 by the August recess, but some are tempering expectations around the goal as negotiators say they are already off to a late start.
GOP leadership unveiled the proposed plan at a conference meeting early Wednesday, which aims to begin House votes on the party’s funding proposals in early June, a source familiar confirmed to The Hill.
Under the plan, the GOP-led House would start considering the party’s proposed plans to fund military construction and the Department of Veterans Affairs during the first week of June. The chamber would then pick up consideration of plans to fund the departments of Homeland Security, State, and Defense at the end of the month.
GOP leaders say the House would consider legislation funding the legislative branch, financial services, and general government, as well as the departments of Agriculture (USDA), Transportation, Labor and Health and Human Services, and other offices, the following month.
“If we don’t hit any speed bumps it could work,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the funding subcommittee that oversees dollars for the USDA, said Wednesday when asked about the plan. “But we usually hit speed bumps.”
He added that he thinks the party’s goal of passing all 12 bills across the floor “won’t be any easier” than last year — when intraparty divides over spending and policy areas like abortion dominated public attention as the conference struggled to unify behind its appropriations bills.
Negotiators said earlier this year that the party’s internal rifts on spending cost them leverage with Democrats when it came time to conference both chambers’ drastically different funding bills for fiscal 2024.
House Republicans are again taking a similar approach to last year, marking up their bills at lower levels than expected in the Democratic-led Senate as Republicans press for cuts to overall nondefense funding.
House Democrats have also come out against GOP-backed policies that they have decried as “poison pill” riders in some of the funding partisan legislation unveiled so far. That means Republicans will likely have a hard time again notching backing from the other side of the aisle to pass the measures, putting more pressure on the party’s narrow House majority to get its bills passed.
“We’re probably going to be heavily dependent on exclusively Republican votes in committee, and then on the floor,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), another spending cardinal, said Wednesday. “We realize that. It’s just a sign of the times.”
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