What Must End, Will End. But When and How?
Q. Congress bought itself additional time (until January 19 and February 2). Is that a good sign?
A. Only in that a shutdown was avoided and there is more time to find a resolution. As reported in Advocacy at a Glance link there has been some possible progress among House Republicans. Otherwise, Speaker Johnson is likely to have the same problem on January 19 as he did on November 17 and as Speaker McCarthy had on September 30.
Q. What is needed for Congress to reach agreement on FY 24 appropriations bills?
A. Without an agreement on total spending and the allocation of those monies to specific spending bills, there really isn’t much to discuss over the next 8 weeks. This problem is compounded by the many House policy riders that are DOA in the Senate.
Appropriately, as described in this week’s Advocacy at a Glance, the House Republican Caucus has started to discuss the most important gap–that under Speaker McCarthy, the Appropriations Committees were encouraged to adopt bills that were hundreds of millions of dollars less than the spending levels in the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) agreement reached in June between House Republicans and President Biden.
Q. Some conservative Republican leaders appear willing to accept the higher FRA spending amount and that makes House-Senate negotiations feasible. Would that set up a dynamic by which FDA would see its FY 24 budget set at approximately the same as FY 23?
A. Probably but not necessarily. As described in last week’s Analysis and Commentary, support for increased defense spending often is the key to increased non-defense spending.
This was part of the FRA negotiating frame–except that defense spending was part of the enacted legislation and the “level up” provisions protecting non-defense programs were in a so-called side agreement that was not in the legislation. This agreement is described in this Roll Call article.
Depending on how this is resolved, FDA could receive roughly level funding or might be at risk for an up to 8% across the board spending decrease from its FY 23 level.
Editorial Note:
The Analysis and Commentary section is written by Steven Grossman, Executive Director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA.