Leaders in Congress Reach Agreement to Spend $1.3 Trillion

WASHINGTON — With government funding set to run out this weekend, congressional leaders agreed on a voluminous $1.3 trillion spending bill on Wednesday that would beef up domestic and military programs and keep the government open through September.

“We’re feeling very good about this,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters after a meeting of top congressional leaders at the Capitol, which buzzed with activity even as the falling snow shuttered much of Washington.

The House and Senate have until midnight Friday to pass the spending bill to avoid what would be the third government shutdown of the year. As part of the spending talks, congressional leaders worked in recent days to resolve disputes over issues like immigration, a wall on the southern border with Mexico, health care and a planned rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey that has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump.

As the negotiations wrapped up on Capitol Hill, the president himself emerged as a potential obstacle, waffling on Wednesday about whether he could support the final package in part because it lacked sufficient funding for his wall. To salvage the agreement, Speaker Paul Ryan went to the White House residence to meet with Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs chief, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, joining by telephone.

A White House official said the group smoothed over differences on a number of items, including the wall and other border issues, as well as transportation and military funding.

Afterward, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, issued an upbeat statement making it clear that Trump had overcome his reservations, saying that he and the congressional leaders had “discussed their support for the bill.”

The text of the spending bill, spanning 2,232 pages, was unveiled Wednesday night. To improve border security, the measure includes $1.6 billion for more than 90 miles of physical barriers along the border with Mexico as well as related technology, according to congressional aides.

But there are strings attached to what can be built, and the funding is far short of the total Trump would ultimately need to build his promised “big, beautiful wall.” Some of the funding is for replacing existing barriers.

The spending bill does not resolve the uncertain fate of hundreds of thousands of young unauthorized immigrants who have been protected under an Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that Trump has moved to end.

An effort by some lawmakers to include in the spending bill a proposal to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act was unsuccessful, at least in part because of a dispute over abortion. But the bill includes a fix to the grain glitch, a flaw in the sweeping tax overhaul passed last year that stood to hurt certain agricultural businesses.

Another sticking point in recent days was funding for a series of rail infrastructure projects in the New York City area known as the Gateway program, including a new tunnel under the Hudson River. Despite his New York roots, Trump zeroed in on Gateway and urged Republican leaders not to provide federal funds for it — an apparent rebuke to Schumer, whose caucus the president has repeatedly accused of obstructionism.

The spending bill does not include $900 million in funding for Gateway that had been included last year in House legislation. But according to a senior Senate Democratic aide, it includes hundreds of millions of dollars that could go toward the Gateway program, including funds that do not require the approval of Trump’s Transportation Department.

As November’s midterm elections loom, the legislation also includes $380 million in grants to states for election technology.

And although Congress has shown little appetite for passing significant gun control legislation in response to the mass shooting last month in Parkland, Florida, the spending bill includes a modest measure to improve reporting to the national background check system for gun purchases. It also includes funds for school safety.

Congress approved a broad two-year budget deal last month that paved the way for this week’s legislation. That deal set overall spending levels, raising strict limits on military and domestic spending by a total of about $140 billion this year. The spending bill this week allocates the allowed spending among a vast array of federal programs.

The bill is long overdue, coming almost halfway through the 2018 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. Since then, Congress has needed five stopgap spending measures to keep the government open. By snapping that streak of short-term patches, lawmakers would provide a dose of stability to federal agencies that have been left in limbo as Congress lurched from one stopgap measure to the next.

Even with the spending bill unveiled, there is still some risk of a brief shutdown this weekend, as any one senator can stop the Senate from speeding up consideration of the bill to meet Friday’s deadline. Last month, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did just that, causing an hourslong shutdown as he bemoaned the government’s mounting debt. This time around, with lawmakers expected to vote on a gigantic spending bill with little time to digest its contents, Paul is unhappy yet again.

“It’s a rotten, terrible, no-good way to run your government,” he said Tuesday, adding, “Really, should we be looking in thousand-page bills with 24 hours to decide what’s in them?”

He was not the only lawmaker with such frustration.

“Whoever designed this process is not qualified to run a food truck,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “It’s embarrassing. And as bad as it looks from the outside, you ought to see it from the inside.”

The approval of the spending bill would be another blow to those worried about the government’s ballooning debt, which has topped $21 trillion. That issue seemed of little concern on Capitol Hill as Trump and Republican lawmakers pushed for much more military funding, and Democrats demanded similar increases for domestic priorities. The spending bill will leave lawmakers from both parties with much to boast about, including billions of dollars for infrastructure and for fighting the opioid epidemic, as well as the biggest increase in military funding in years.

“This legislation fulfills our pledge to rebuild the United States military,” Ryan said after the bill was unveiled, while conceding, “No bill of this size is perfect.”

The spending spree comes on the heels of the Republicans’ tax overhaul, which was projected to add $1.5 trillion to federal budget deficits over a decade. The deficit is now expected to exceed $1 trillion in the 2019 fiscal year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group.

The spending bill gave the most conservative members of Congress little to celebrate. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, expressed disappointment with the modest funding for fortifying the border.

“It is troubling when we get a tunnel and we don’t get a wall,” he said. “The last time I checked, the president didn’t make any promises about getting a tunnel in any of his campaign stops, at least not in North Carolina.”

The final negotiations on the spending bill dealt with more than just dollars, and Democrats were able to exert influence in the talks because votes from their party are needed to approve the legislation in the Senate and will most likely be needed in the House as well.

One particularly difficult issue was immigration, including Trump’s wall, as well as the future of young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers.

Trump’s closing of the DACA program is being challenged in court, and an effort to pass immigration legislation failed last month in the Senate.

Over the weekend, the White House offered to extend protections for DACA recipients for 2 1/2 years in exchange for $25 billion for the border wall, according to congressional aides. Democrats countered by offering $25 billion in wall funding in exchange for a pathway to citizenship for a broader population of Dreamers, which the White House rejected.