Schumer expresses new-year optimism on government funding, border talks
The top Senate Democrat alluded to the unfinished business on both fronts but indicated there’s a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday afternoon resumed his sales job on the agreement he reached with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Sunday evening that set the spending limits on the funding bills Congress must pass within the next month to keep the government open.
“When we began our negotiations, our goal was to preserve a nondefense funding level of $772 billion, the same level agreed to in our debt ceiling deal last June,” Schumer said of the deal President Joe Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated last year. “And that $772 billion was precisely the number we reached. Not a nickel was cut.”
And although Johnson was able to front-load the $20 billion in cuts that congressional Democrats passed in 2022 for the IRS to audit rich and wealth tax cheats instead of splitting them between this year and next, Schumer said the cuts won’t immediately impact the agency’s work. Congressional Republicans will continue to chip away at this funding until it does though.
Johnson also recouped $6.1 billion in unspent COVID-19 money and maintained the $886-billion military budget, up from $858 billion in 2023, which is sure to please Republican defense hawks—while rankling progressive Democrats.
Nonetheless, Schumer said the agreement will enable Congress to avoid a government shutdown while preserving key domestic programs, a priority for Democrats.
But House conservatives are unhappy with the deal. They can derail it by attaching policy riders that would delay the enactment of the funding bills to reattach the culture-war provisions that the House passed but ultimately won’t be signed into law.
“If the hard right chooses to spoil this agreement with poison pills, they’ll be to blame if we start careening towards a shutdown,” Schumer warned. “And I know Speaker Johnson has said that nobody wants to see a shutdown happen.”
The leader also gave an update on the negotiations between Senate Republicans and Democrats on a package of border security reforms that would also unlock billions in emergency funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
He described the latest rounds of talks, which date back to late last year, as promising and filled with more progress than the past few weeks.
Schumer cautioned that there’s still plenty of unfinished business and reiterated that both sides would have to accept some displeasing compromises, but committed Senate Democrats would continue to negotiate in good faith.
“Our broken border and our national security are at stake in this supplemental,” he said. “And we must do everything we can to reach an agreement.”
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