The House and Senate are in this week. The major policy question is what will emerge from the Budget Reconciliation process, an effort by Republicans to fast-track around Democrats and put their spending and taxation priorities into law.
Senate Republicans advanced a budget resolution out of the upper chamber on a 52-48 vote, but it doesn’t include everything that Trump has demanded. (They intend to move a second resolution with the rest of his priorities.) Now House Republicans will try to pass their own Budget resolution. This one will contain almost all their priorities in one bill. The Senate held off on the more divisive stuff until later, but the House will try to swallow it in one big gulp. The big question is whether they can do so without splitting the party and killing the resolution. We will find out in votes they hold this week.
Another rapidly approaching crossroads is the Fiscal Year 2025 appropriations bills. FY 2025 started on October 1, but Republicans prevented the adoption of bills to appropriate (i.e. direct the spending of) funds. The government has been running on autopilot under a “continuing resolution,” which more or less kept funding levels at the FY 2024 level. But that continuing resolution ends on March 14th, and Congress must pass the appropriations bills to keep the government open.
To pass appropriations bills, they will need Democratic support in the Senate and perhaps in the House. However, the Trump administration’s use of impoundment — when the White House illegally prevents the spending of funds already appropriated by Congress — is making it hard to strike an agreement over the spending levels. Democrats insist that the Trump administration follow the law and spend money as Congress has directed, but senior Republicans have indicated they want to give Trump a free hand, in other words, let him ignore the law. There is no incentive for Democrats to negotiate when any deal can be undone after it is enacted.
Making all of this more fraught is the need to address the debt ceiling. Republican demagoguery on raising or eliminating the debt ceiling means that some Republicans are unwilling to vote for such a measure, necessitating Democratic votes. The government already is using extraordinary measures to stay open, but at some point will run out of runway and will start missing payments to creditors. Should this happen, the financial markets will seize up and we likely will experience an economic catastrophe. When is the X date everything goes haywire? The best guess is sometime in the spring or summer, depending on tax receipts.
On the House floor this week are a bunch of minor bills. There is, however, the very consequential budget resolution discussed above, H. Con. Res. 14, and a few resolutions to overturn regulations issued towards the end of 2024.
There are 42 House committee meetings this week, including nine appropriations proceedings, five proceedings in the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, and so on. I’d keep an eye on the House Oversight Committee’s hearing with GAO Director Dodaro, today, Feb. 25, who will speak about the “2025 High-Risk List,” which identifies which federal programs are most susceptible to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. This will be notable in part because it may address the systemic instability introduced by the new administration’s management decisions.
As usual, the Senate does a poor job of indicating what will occur on the floor this week. According to POLITICO, the Senate will continue to work through Trump’s nominations, starting with the Secretary of the Army and the U.S. Trade Representative. It may also vote on resolutions to undo late-Biden-era regulations.
There are twenty-five Senate committee proceedings scheduled this week, with four proceedings before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Commerce Committee. A good number of the proceedings concern nominations, including the nominees to serve as the deputy secretaries of Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Directors of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Federal Trade Commissioner, the Deputy Attorney General and an Assistant Attorney General, Secretary of Labor and deputy secretary, Secretary of the Navy, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Deputy Secretary of Transportation, and more.
