House Republicans Mulling New Approach to Stopgap Funding

WASHINGTON — With current funding for the entire government set to expire on Nov. 17, House Republicans are considering a new approach to stopgap funding that would give them time to pass appropriations bills and ensure that at least some of the government remains funded during that process.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has already acknowledged that with so much remaining on the plates of the House and Senate, getting everything the two chambers need to get done in so short a time frame is a near impossibility.

“We’re running out of time,” he said Thursday, during a briefing with reporters on Capitol Hill. “I think everyone here recognizes that.”

“We’re moving as quickly as we can here, and the Senate is a little behind us, but then you have the conference committee process and all of that,” he said.

Johnson said he intends to pass a continuing resolution by mid-November that would fund the entire government through the middle of January.

“That would get us beyond the sort of Christmas rush and things that typically jam us in the House,” he said. 

“I think there are some good arguments for that,” the speaker continued. “But some of my colleagues have other ideas as well.”

One idea that was raised in the House Republican Conference meeting just ahead of Johnson’s press conference on Thursday, was passing something he and his colleagues are calling a “laddered CR” that would extend funding on a kind of piecemeal basis.

The idea, as one Hill staffer explained to The Well News on Friday, calls for extending specific pieces of current appropriations for different time periods, thereby avoiding the risk that a set single deadline would trigger a widespread government shutdown.

“I’ll unpack for you what that means here in the coming days, but potentially you would do a CR that extends individual pieces of the appropriations process, individual bills,” Johnson said. 

“We’ll see how that goes. I think we can build consensus around it,” he added.

Johnson was far from being cagey. The reality, according to members who were in the room, is that the concept proposed was very bareboned, with many, many details remaining to be worked out.

“It was a new conversation, if you will,” the member said. “Nothing was agreed upon by the conference at all. It’s just something that we’re talking about.”

The basic premise is that some parts of the government would continue to be funded while Congress continued to work through the ongoing delay in the appropriations process for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.

At the same time, the House member said, it would keep the pressure on the Senate to pass its bills — “forcing it to do its job,” the member said — and start conference talks with the House as quickly as possible.

“Essentially what they’re talking about is getting away from this concept of a continuing resolution having a single end date,” said another Hill staffer familiar with what the conference members discussed.

“Like right now, we’re looking at Nov. 17 as the day when there could possibly be a partial government shutdown across the federal government,” the staffer said. “What a laddered CR would do is break that up a little bit.

“So you’d have one group of two or three funding bills that would expire one day, say, Dec. 15, and then you’d have another one or two bills that would expire a week or so beyond that; you might even have a scenario where you have a series of one-day CRs.

“As you know, there are specific bills and a specific level of funding that’s being pushed for them, and some will be more difficult to pass than others,” the staffer said. “So the idea is, ‘let’s pass what we can, and then when we get to ones that are more difficult, even if a shutdown occurs, it will affect a much smaller percentage of the government.

“The expectation is, this would have a two-pronged effect: it would, as others have told you, prod the Senate to do its job. At the same time, it would kind of alleviate some of the pressure on certain Republicans who have said in the past that they could never vote for a continuing resolution,” the staffer added.

If the Republican Conference were to embrace the laddered approach to continuing resolutions, the obvious question is whether they could get Democrats to buy into it.

For everyone The Well News spoke to, with the agreement their comments would be on background, that question was a bridge too far to contemplate at the moment.

“What you have to understand is this is an absolutely new proposal, even to the Republican Conference, and nothing is concrete at this point,” one said. “I think the discussion right now is what kind of consensus can we get among Republicans about this idea, and other discussions may follow.”

In fact, a number of Democrats on Friday were already suggesting that rather than being a solution, laddered CRs might even create more of a problem, leading to a rolling cascade of shutdown threats akin to a rolling energy blackout.

On Friday, during his weekly meeting with reporters, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., scoffed at the notion of a “laddered” continuing resolution and sarcastically applauded “the novelty” of the proposal and “how my friends on the other side of the aisle … come up with language that disguises their intentions.”

“Translation: They want to shut the government down,” he said. “And that’s because many of my Republican colleagues fundamentally do not believe in a functional federal government which is designed to ensure the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people.

“It was my hope that under new management, there would be a different approach and that remains to be seen what will happen in advance of Nov. 17. But let’s be clear, the only way forward is in a bipartisan way to pass a continuing resolution at the fiscal 2023 level,” Jeffries said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue