House Passes 3 Budget Packages, Rejects Farm Bill

The Capitol is seen at dawn. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

The House has advanced three budget bills, rejected the proposed Farm Bill, and is expected to vote on a continuing resolution (CR) Friday—Sept. 29—to temporarily fund the federal government until a Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) budget is adopted.

Without a CR in place, the federal government will go into a partial shutdown when the new fiscal year begins in less than two days on Oct. 1.

In late-night Sept. 28 votes, the House approved the $91.5 billion Homeland Security budget, $52.5 billion State Department spending plan, and $886.3 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), or annual defense budget that earmarks $826 billion for the Pentagon.

The House also overwhelmingly passed a standalone measure to retain a $300 million allocation for Ukraine in the NDAA. Joining all Democrats were 105 Republicans in the 311–117 approval.

The House’s proposed $22.5 billion Farm Bill failed in a 237–191 vote with 27 Republicans joining all Democrats in rejecting the massive package that outlines $1.46 trillion in spending over the next decade.

More than 200 amendments in various iterations were added to the Farm Bill, teed up as HR 4368, by the Rules Committee on Sept. 22 and then on the House floor during a seven-hour floor slugfest that adjourned at 3 a.m. Sept. 27.

The rejected Farm Bill slashes funding for most United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) agencies and programs to “pre-COVID” levels, strips federal officials of salaries, eliminates “woke” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, requires in-person doctor appointments for prescribing mifepristone chemical abortions, ends pandemic-induced increases in women and children nutrition programs, defunds dozens of domestic and international assistance programs, and repeals host of climate change provisions included in 2020 and 2021 bills.

The House passed the proposed FY24 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act in a 220–208 vote. The chamber’s plan cuts more than $11 billion from President Joe Biden’s $103.2 billion budget request but increases “discretionary” spending from $60.4 billion to $62.8 billion.

The $91.5 billion Homeland Security (DHS) budget includes $2.1 billion to resume building the wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, $500 million to hire 22,000 Border Patrol agents, and requires DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to “adhere to the law and resume construction of physical barriers on the border immediately.”

The House also adopted the $52.5 billion FY24 Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act in a 216–212 vote.

The chamber’s State Department budget, adopted as HR 4665, trims nearly a quarter—$16.4 billion—from President Biden’s budget request by eliminating contributions to dozens of international organizations, suspending funding for the United Nations and United States Agency for International Development (US AID), and “clawing back $11.14 billion of the Democrats’ wasteful spending over the last two years,” said House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.).

The proposed House State Department spending plan is $7.2 billion, or 12 percent, less than this year’s budget and $1.7 billion below FY19’s enacted level. It provides $4.4 billion for “national security interests in the Indo-Pacific region,” $1 billion more than the Biden administration requested.

Democrats argued that the bill would actually cut the State Department’s operations budget by 31 percent and gut contributions to international organizations by 82 percent.

The House has adopted its version of the proposed defense budget in a 218–210 vote and dispatched it to the Senate, where many of the “culture war” amendments conservatives successfully attached to the must-pass annual appropriations package are likely to be rejected by the Democrat-led chamber.

During extensive March-July deliberations, the Republican-led House repealed the Department of Defense’s (DOD) abortion travel policy, prohibited DOD healthcare programs from providing gender transition procedures, adopted a DOD “Parents Bill of Rights,” and introduced a host of other proposed add-ons targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs into the bill.

With the three adoptions, as of noon Sept. 29, the House had passed four of the 12 appropriations packages that constitute the annual federal budget. It must approve the remaining eight—including the rejected Farm Bill—resolve differences with the Senate’s budget bills, and get it all done by midnight, Sept. 30.

If a budget is not in place by Oct. 1, either the federal government will partially shut down for the 11th time since 1980 or it will be sustained at present funding levels through a continuing resolution (CR) for the 48th time since 2010.