House Passes $1.3 Trillion Spending Bill; Focus Shifts to Senate as Clock Ticks

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday gave swift approval to a $1.3 trillion spending bill that would fund the government through September, shaking off the objections of its most conservative members and voting less than 24 hours after the 2,232-page document was unveiled.

With government funding set to expire at midnight Friday, the focus is now on the Senate, whose approval is needed to avert what would be the third government shutdown of the year.

The spending bill, which congressional leaders agreed to Wednesday and President Donald Trump seemed to grudgingly endorse on Twitter, would provide big increases to the military and to domestic programs — and clearly rebuff the Trump administration’s efforts to dramatically scale back the reach and scope of the federal government.

By Thursday night, it remained uncertain when the Senate might vote. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who caused an hourslong shutdown last month as he protested soaring government spending, used Twitter to vent his frustration with the spending bill, but he stayed mum on whether he would object to holding a vote before Friday’s deadline.

The spending bill, which congressional leaders agreed to on Wednesday and President Donald Trump seemed to grudgingly endorse on Twitter, would provide big increases to the military and to domestic programs — and clearly rebuff the Trump administration’s efforts to sharply scale back the reach and scope of the federal government.

Congress paved the way for this week’s legislation with a two-year budget deal last month that raised strict limits on military and domestic spending by about $140 billion this year.

In dividing up the spoils of that budget agreement, Congress broadly rebuked the Trump administration’s initial vision for the federal government. The president’s desire to drastically cut spending on the environment was rebuffed. Programs like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, far from being eliminated, were spared any reductions. Not only did the administration’s request for deep cuts to the National Institutes of Health go nowhere, but Congress gave the agency an additional $3 billion.

“Sometimes you save the president from themselves,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the health institutes.

The spending bill “repudiates the abysmal Trump budget, investing robustly in critical priorities like child care; transportation infrastructure; national security; election protection; medical research; opioid abuse, prevention and treatment; veterans’ health services; and much more,” said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

At the White House, Trump’s top advisers worked to put the best face on a package they conceded fell short of fully funding his priorities and contained many items he would rather not have swallowed.

“In order to get the defense spending, primarily, but all the rest of our priorities funded, we had to give away a lot of stuff that we didn’t want to give away” to Democrats, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters during a briefing where he also highlighted funding in important areas like the military, school safety,border security and combating the opioid crisis.

“My job is to get the president’s priorities funded, which this does,” added Mulvaney, a onetime budget hawk in Congress who routinely voted against large spending packages and sidestepped a question on whether he would have done so for the measure now before lawmakers. “The president wants it to pass and wants it to be signed.”

But the bill landed with a thud among conservatives who are still on Capitol Hill. The House Freedom Caucus, whose founding members included Mulvaney, formally opposed it and sent a letter to Trump urging him to reject it.

Another founding member of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said the spending bill was “maybe the worst bill I’ve ever seen” and recalled the 2016 election that put Republicans in full control of Washington.

“Nov. 8, 2016, I doubt that the voters were saying, ‘Put Republicans in power so that they can pass a bill that continues to fund sanctuary cities, continues to fund Planned Parenthood,'” he said. “Really? Really? That’s what the election was about?”

Among other things, the bill includes $1.6 billion for more than 90 miles of physical barriers along the border with Mexico, as well as related technology. But that sum is far short of what Trump would need to construct the expansive border wall that he promised in his campaign for president.

The bill does not address the fate of young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children and have been shielded from deportation by an Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that Trump moved last year to end.

As November’s midterm elections loom, the spending bill will allow lawmakers from both parties to go home and claim success on a wide range of issues, including beefing up the military and providing much-needed funding for priorities such as combating the opioid epidemic and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure.

That additional spending comes at the expense of adding even further to the national debt, which has topped $21 trillion — something that has seemed of minimal concern on Capitol Hill in recent months, where Republicans passed a sweeping tax overhaul late last year that will also result in piling up more debt.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., an outspoken deficit hawk who nonetheless voted for the tax overhaul, called the spending bill “one of the most grotesque pieces of legislation I can remember.”

“I know it’s going to pass overwhelmingly because there’s too much in it to make people happy for the moment,” he said. “But let me just say, down the road, the American people are going to be very unhappy with our lack of responsibility.” Aside from the bill’s contents, the process for approving it this week left bruised feelings as well, as the bill was not made public until Wednesday night.

“In all honesty, none of us know what is actually in this bill,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Thursday morning, just hours before House members were asked to give their approval to the bill.

The House gave its approval early Thursday afternoon in a vote of 256-167.

Though the bill’s eventual approval in the Senate is not in doubt, it is less clear when exactly that vote will take place.

If a senator insisted, he or she could block the Senate from voting until early Saturday, causing a brief shutdown of the government. In a similar situation last month, Paul did exactly that, raising concerns that he could take another stand this week.

Paul has made clear in recent days that he disapproves of both the process for jamming the spending bill through Congress as well as the substance of the legislation.

“I’m upset that we’re spending like every Democrat that we criticized,” he said this week. “I ran for office because I thought the Obama spending and trillion-dollar annual deficits were a real problem for our country, and now Republicans are doing the same thing, and so I’m giving them the same grief I gave Obama.”

Paul fumed about the bill in a series of Twitter posts Thursday, offering observations as he made his way through the legislation, which he said took more than two hours to print in his office.

“On page 207,” he wrote in the afternoon. “2000+ pages to go! Reading about the ever wasteful $6 billion National Science Foundation.”