Congress is still working through the 12 annual fiscal year 2014 appropriations bills to fund federal programs, but wrapping up this process before the start of the new fiscal year is looking less and less likely. The situation is exacerbated because the budget resolutions adopted by the House and Senate are vastly different, which means that there are also significant differences between the FY14 House and Senate appropriations proposals.
The House already passed the Defense, Energy and Water, Homeland Security and MilCon/Veterans Affairs appropriations bills, with eight bills still remaining. The Senate has considered 11 of 12 bills (all except Interior and Environment) in Committee, but have not considered any appropriations bills on the Floor.
In order to wrap up this work before the start of the new fiscal year, the House and Senate would have to pass and agree on final funding levels for all outstanding appropriations bills. This is a tall order on a very short time frame, so we can expect that Congress will once again this year pass and the President will sign a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government funded at last year’s level in order to avoid a government shutdown.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.