With yet another federal government shutdown looming, there’s an urgent need for Congress to reach a spending agreement in the next few days to keep federal agencies running.However, members are at an impasse on the best way forward.
Congress has a few options on how to proceed. One would be to pass a short-term spending agreement called a “continuing resolution,” which keeps the government funded at current levels for a few months but sets up yet another funding fight down the road.
The other option would be to pass a comprehensive spending agreement that funds the government for the duration of the current fiscal year, which ends next September.
Omnibus: How the U.S. Congress passes the budgetCongress uses the omnibus spending bill to package together many smaller ordinary appropriations bills into one larger bill that ...
Each year, Congress is supposed to pass 12 separate spending bills to fund different functions of the government. But they rarely do that anymore, and they often roll all these different spending bills into one bill called an omnibus.
Congress has passed an omnibus each of the past two years.
Republican and Democratic negotiators are currently working on an omnibus with the blessing of many congressional leaders. Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, said earlier this month that it was her "strong preference" to fully fund the government through the rest of fiscal year 2023.
Likewise, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently that there was “widespread agreement” among high-ranking members that an omnibus was needed.
However, a growing number of Republicans in the House and Senate are calling for delaying any kind of comprehensive spending agreement ahead of the House of Representatives coming under GOP control in the new Congress next month. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), for example, accused GOP leadership of “working overtime to try to pass an omnibus spending bill in collusion with Democrats rather than a short-term continuing resolution.”
