Congress is struggling to strike a deal to keep the government funded as a looming deadline to prevent a shutdown next month gets closer.
Lawmakers are less than a month away from a mid-March date to pass legislation to prevent a funding lapse — or risk the first shutdown in years.
“We can’t have precisely the same kind of deal we had before, and we’re trying to work to find some common ground,” House Appropriations Committee Chair
Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said shortly before the House left for a one-week recess this week.
Negotiators on both sides have been working to strike a spending deal for weeks, with hopes of crafting the 12 annual funding bills that could make it out of both chambers with bipartisan support — and across President Trump’s desk for signature.
But they also say the task has gotten more difficult as fallout spreads over a sweeping operation undertaken by the Trump administration to reshape the federal government.
“We cannot come to a deal where you hammer out gains, losses, but you come to a conclusion and you come to a meeting of the minds,” Rep.
Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters. “That should not be subject to some third party deciding that that’s not what they want.”
“We had a deal last year, all of us and so forth, and then there was an interloper with no authority, no legitimacy, nonelected, who said, ‘Don’t vote for it,’” DeLauro said, as Democrats have continued to zero in on tech billionaire Elon Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DeLauro and Cole have both continued to press for a deal on a top-line agreement on how much to fund the government for fiscal 2025 — a key step to kick off work on hashing out annual funding bills. But there is growing acknowledgement that a stopgap of some kind is necessary as Congress hurtles toward a March 14 deadline to keep the lights on with no clear plan on how to prevent a funding lapse.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has left the door open to the idea of a stopgap, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), that would run through the end of the fiscal year. The idea has some support from conservatives who want to see funding levels kept flat through September, even if it
locks in continued spending in line with some of former President Biden’s funding priorities in the meantime. However, some Republicans are resisting the idea.
