House OKs $1.1 trillion spending bill

Vote aims to avoid repeat of government shutdown

The House bipartisan spending bill passed Wednesday fills out the budget agreement forged by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., shown Dec. 10 when they first announced the agreement.
The House bipartisan spending bill passed Wednesday fills out the budget agreement forged by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., shown Dec. 10 when they first announced the agreement.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. House on Wednesday passed a $1.1 trillion bipartisan spending bill that would finance the federal government through Sept. 30 and avoid a repeat of October’s partial shutdown.


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Lawmakers voted 359-67 to send the measure to the Senate, which is set to pass it later this week. Because current funding had been scheduled to lapse Wednesday night, both chambers passed a separate measure pushing the deadline to Saturday.

The White House-backed spending bill includes $1.01 trillion for U.S. government operations and additional funds for war financing. To reach an agreement, Republicans shelved their demands to block funding for President Barack Obama’s health-care law, while Democrats voted to spend far less than they proposed earlier this year.

“In this agreement, no one gets everything they want,” Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said Wednesday. “It’s a good bill, a solid bill.”

Lawmakers agreed on the $1.01 trillion base spending level in December as part of a two-year budget plan.

The bill increases core agency spending by $26 billion over the 2013 fiscal year, after last year’s automatic spending cuts took it to $986 billion. But it’s $31 billion less than Congress passed last March before automatic cuts known as sequestration took effect.

Domestic programs are kept, on average, at levels agreed to last year before the automatic cuts of 5 percent kicked in across the board. Those broadly applied cuts were triggered by Washington’s inability to follow up a 2011 budget deal with additional deficit savings.

NASA, the FBI and the Border Patrol all won spending increases at the expense of cuts to the Transportation Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service and foreign aid.

The bill fills out the budget agreement sealed last month by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the heads of the Senate and House budget committees. Murray and Ryan left it to the chairmen of Congress’ appropriations committees, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., to work out the details.

In Wednesday’s vote, 166 Republicans and 193 Democrats backed the measure while 64 Republicans and three Democrats opposed it. The Democrats in opposition were Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Rush Holt of New Jersey and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina.

The bill would continue Congress’ trend toward reducing discretionary funds. Spending in fiscal 2010, including wars and disaster aid, totaled $1.275 trillion, according to the House Appropriations Committee. That compares with Wednesday’s $1.1 trillion measure for fiscal 2014, which began Oct. 1 and runs through Sept. 30.

After a 16-day shutdown in October and years of automatic spending cuts and stopgap bills that took the government from crisis to crisis, lawmakers said they were glad they were finally able to vote on a comprehensive plan.

“We ought to recognize that while we’ve had some partisan differences, the legislation was crafted in a bipartisan way,” said Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, chairman of the subcommittee that oversees legislative operations. “It’s something that we frankly ought to take some pride in.”

But several lawmakers complained that they and their staff members didn’t have time to read the whole measure. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said on the House floor that lawmakers may soon learn it contains provisions they wouldn’t have wanted.

Still, he said lawmakers had to back the bill because “the alternative is shutting the government down.”

Conservative groups denounced the measure, saying it was dropped in the cover of darkness and voted on before lawmakers could possibly have read it. The conservative political action committee Club for Growth said a vote for the measure would hurt any lawmaker’s conservative scorecard.

Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, castigated it as a budget buster that is returning Washington to its free-spending ways.

The Heritage Foundation drafted a lengthy to-do list for the spending bill, which included prohibiting funds to build a prison in the United States to house detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; eliminating all money for Vice President Joe Biden’s high speed rail projects; cutting the operating budget of the Fish and Wildlife Service;

providing money for private school vouchers for the District of Columbia; and significantly reducing the IRS’ budget, with language requiring more oversight of the potential targeting of political groups.

All of those requests were carried out, about half the demands in all, and yet Heritage Action demanded a “no” vote.

The response in the Republican-led House was a collective shrug.

“If I started voting how they want me to, versus what I think is right, then they’ve already won,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, who is dealing with one of the best-financed Tea Party challenges of this campaign year. “Eh, it is what it is.”

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based advocacy group that opposes government waste, also expressed concern about the spending measure, saying a person would have had to read the bill at more than a page a minute, without sleep, to see the entire thing in time for the vote.

“While we’re happy Congress is finally getting its work done - albeit more than three months late - this is not how legislation that is funding all of government should be done,” Steve Ellis, vice president for Taxpayers for Common Sense, said in an email.

Rogers told the Rules Committee on Tuesday that he hoped the rushed vote was a one-year-only event.

“I only wish we could consider each and every bill in this package separately, but unfortunately, the timing gives us one shot and one shot only to get it done,” Rogers said.

Lawmakers have said a more regular appropriations cycle will reduce the threat of shutdowns and provide certainty to businesses and investors.

Lowey and Rogers said they intend to pass 12 individual spending bills for fiscal 2015 before it begins Oct. 1. The last time Congress passed all of its spending bills on time was during the mid-1990s.

This week’s agreement will allow Congress to “get the train back on track,” Rogers said.

GOVERNORS ‘FRUSTRATED’

Despite the passage of the spending measure, Congress received criticism Wednesday for its recent political gridlock, which the nation’s governors said stymied the passage of almost every federal initiative most needed by the states.

“We are now midway through the 113th Congress, and governors are frustrated,” said Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, a Republican and chairman of the National Governors Association, as she delivered the group’s second State of the States address.

“Despite the recent budget agreement, partisan gridlock continues to prevent long term policy solutions,” Fallin said. “We’re doing our part as governors to create jobs and address the challenges facing our states and this country. But we also believe that now it’s time for our federal partners to do theirs and to take action.”

Last January, the governors association went to Washington to lay out a blueprint of what states needed from lawmakers. This year’s list of requests, Fallin said, is almost identical.

Fallin and the vice chairman of the association, Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, delivered the address at the National Press Club.

In particular, the governors called on Congress and the White House to fix what they said were flaws in the No Child Left Behind Act, to reauthorize the Water Resources Development Act, to restore the 15 percent of cash set aside for states under the Workforce Investment Act, to ensure that each state’s National Guard has enough money to operate effectively, and to give states more flexibility to experiment with new solutions to nagging problems.

GATES SPEAKS OUT

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates also took a swipe at Congress, saying he probably would have quit if he had held the job when the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration took effect last year.

“I think I would have resigned” because “it is such a mindless, stupid way to approach the nation’s defense budget,” Gates said at the beginning of a tour to promote his memoir, Duty.

Gates left office in June 2011, two months before passage of the Budget Control Act that mandated sequestration. He tried to convince Congress that the Pentagon should be spared from deeper cuts on the rationale that he had imposed billions of dollars in savings from efficiency as well as offering $78 billion in reductions in January 2011.

Instead, under the budget act the Pentagon faced $500 billion in reductions over 10 years starting in January 2013. The cuts took effect last March, reducing the fiscal 2013 budget by $37 billion - $32 billion for basic defense and $5 billion in war spending.

“It is so irrational, so damaging I’m not sure I could have tolerated it,” Gates said.

Sequestration was eased through the congressional budget deal last month, which restored $22.3 billion for this fiscal year and $9 billion in fiscal 2015 from about $52 billion in annual reductions over that period.

But the Pentagon faces a tight squeeze even as it avoids another wave of automatic cuts. Under the measure passed Wednesday, the Pentagon’s core budget would be basically frozen at $487 billion after most accounts absorbed an 8 percent automatic cut last year.

Adding $6 billion to Obama’s war request provides some relief to readiness accounts, however, though active-duty troop levels would still be cut by 40,000 to 1.36 million. It includes $85 billion for overseas military operations, a slight cut from last year.

Congress also moved to block Obama’s plan to shift control of the U.S. drone campaign from the CIA to the Pentagon, inserting a classified provision in the spending bill that would preserve the spy agency’s role in lethal counter terrorism operations, U.S. officials said.

The measure would restrict the use of any funding to transfer unmanned aircraft or the authority to carry out drone strikes from the CIA to the Pentagon, officials said, impeding an administration plan aimed at returning the CIA’s focus to traditional intelligence gathering and possibly bringing more transparency to drone strikes.

Spokesmen for the White House, CIA and Pentagon declined to comment.

Information for this article was contributed by Derek Wallbank, Greg Giroux, Tony Capaccio and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News; by Rick Lyman and Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times; by Andrew Taylor of The Associated Press; and by Greg Miller, Lori Montgomery and Ed O’Keefe of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/16/2014

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