The 11th hour approval on Saturday night of a continuing resolution (CR) to fund Federal government operations beyond the end of fiscal year (FY) 2023 on Sept. 30 gives the government another 45 days of funding – and Congress the same period to work on legislation for FY2024 appropriations or confront another possible shutdown.
The CR will fund government operations through Nov. 17 at the same levels dictated by full-year FY2023 appropriations.
The legislation funding the government past Sept. 30 was approved by big majorities in both chambers of Congress, with the House voting for it 335-91, and the Senate approving by a vote of 88-9. President Biden quickly signed the legislation after the votes.
“Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans,” President Biden said after signing the CR legislation. “This is good news for the American people.”
“But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place,” President Biden said. “Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.”
The debt ceiling deal approved by Congress in June in the form of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 provides for an increase in the national debt limit through early 2025, and avoided the government hitting its previously approved borrowing limit.
The terms of that legislation will tamp down budgets for Federal civilian agencies for the next two years. The bill will cap Federal non-defense discretionary spending in FY2024 close to FY2023 levels, while limiting non-defense spending increases to one percent in FY2025.
Under the legislation approved in June, defense spending will be permitted to increase by 3.3 percent in FY2024, to $866 billion, including national security programs operated by the Department of Energy.
On the civilian agency front, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) lost $20 billion from a ten-year $80 billion funding boost that the agency received last year to pursue modernization of the agency’s operations – including IT functions. The bill also clawed back funding remaining for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) received through the 2021 American Rescue Plan, and the General Services Administration’s Federal Citizen Services Fund received through the 2020 CARES Act.
