Government Shutdown in Focus as White House Pushes Congress for Stopgap Spending Bill

President Joe Biden delivers a speech at an event in Salt Lake City on Aug. 10, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

A looming government shutdown has come into sharper focus, as the White House on Aug. 31 asked Congress to approve a short-term funding measure to keep the federal government running before it runs out of money at the end of September.

Last year’s $1.7 trillion omnibus funding bill is keeping the government running until the end of fiscal year 2023, which ends on Sept. 30. The massive bill, which totaled more than 4,000 pages, followed three smaller stopgap measures that kept the government operating until congressional leaders negotiated the final, bigger package.

This year, both the House and Senate have tried to pass individual appropriation bills rather than another omnibus measure, although reaching a consensus has been elusive.

With just 11 legislative days left in the current fiscal year, the pressure is building as just one of 12 regular appropriations bills has cleared the House, while none has made it through the Senate.

Now, the White House has entered the fray, with a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) telling media outlets on Aug. 31 that a short-term funding measure is needed to avert a shutdown.

“Although the crucial work continues to reach a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on fiscal year 2024 appropriations bills, it is clear that a short-term continuing resolution (CR) will be needed next month,” the spokeswoman said.

She added that the OMB would provide Congress with help to avert “severe disruptions” to government services during the first quarter of fiscal 2024.

There’s been some progress on building congressional support for a stopgap measure, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) telling his Republican colleagues that lawmakers would likely have to pass a short-term solution in the form of a continuing resolution.

However, there’s been opposition from the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative wing within the House GOP. Its members said in a note titled “No Security, No Funding” that they would oppose any stopgap funding measure unless it includes measures to bolster border security and address “woke” policies in the Department of Defense and “weaponization” of the Department of Justice.

‘We Should Not Fear a Government Shutdown’

At the end of July, as lawmakers broke for their August recess, work on funding the government remained mostly incomplete, with some musing that reaching a consensus would be tricky.

“We’re going to scare the hell out of the American people before we get this done,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said at the time.

Some members of the House Freedom Caucus said at the time that voters elected a GOP majority in the House to rein in out-of-control government spending and so Republicans should be prepared to use every tool available to push for spending cuts.

“We should not fear a government shutdown,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said at a news conference at the end of July. “Most of the American people won’t even miss [it] if the government is shut down temporarily.”

Some House Republicans disagreed, with Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) saying it’s an oversimplification to say most Americans wouldn’t feel the effects of a shutdown, while adding that Republicans would end up taking the blame for it.

“We always get blamed for it, no matter what,” Mr. Simpson said at the time. “So, it’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”

Mr. McCarthy said at the time that he doesn’t want the government to shut down and expressed hope that a deal could be reached on spending cuts.

“We’ve got till Sept. 30. I think we can get this all done,“ Mr. McCarthy said. ”I want to find that we can find common ground.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in mid-August that he had met with Mr. McCarthy and agreed to a continuing resolution that would extend government funding for several months.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a business group in Kentucky this week, “We’re going to end up with a short-term congressional resolution, probably into December, as we struggle to figure out exactly what the government’s spending level is going to be.”

‘Status Quo’

House Freedom Caucus members are pushing back against a short-term resolution to avoid a shutdown.

“What we’re not going to accept is just a clean CR, the same old status quo that we always do that goes into December and pressurizes every member to vote for garbage to get home for Christmas and all that stuff,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told The Washington Times.

The House Freedom Caucus’s demands include capping spending levels below the top-line numbers agreed to as part of recent debt ceiling negotiations, opposing any “blank check for Ukraine,” and addressing what they call the “unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI” to conduct political “witch hunts.”

Members of the group have repeatedly denounced the multiple indictments against former President Donald Trump, who is the front-runner in the GOP primary field for the 2024 presidential election, as politically motivated.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is bracing for a government shutdown, with Goldman Sachs recently saying in a report that it sees a growing risk of such an outcome.

However, Goldman Sachs said that the economic effects if Congress fails to pass a stopgap measure or bigger funding bill by Sept. 30 would be modest, and that markets haven’t in the past reacted strongly to government shutdowns.