Congress finally releases partial budget deal for 2024. But lawmakers are already behind on next year’s spending

Congressional negotiations finally produced a partial budget proposal on Sunday following months of last-minute deals to keep the government running.

“The continuing resolutions, the temporary spending measures that we’ve been voting on, were a band aid to get us to this,” Utah’s newly-elected Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy told the Deseret News on Monday.

Lawmakers applied the fourth, and what most hope is the final, “band aid” on Thursday, extending two chunks of government funding at 2023 levels from March 1 and March 8, to March 8 and March 22.

House Republican Conference vice chairman Blake Moore, representing Utah’s 1st Congressional District, was the only Utahn to support the measure. Reps. Maloy, of Utah’s 2nd District, John Curtis, of Utah’s 3rd, and Burgess Owens, of Utah’s 4th, all opposed the continuing resolution, saying it was just another instance of lawmakers punting their fiscal responsibility down the road.

Congress is supposed to pass 12 annual appropriations bills individually before Sept. 30 to bankroll government operations for the next year. Lawmakers haven’t done this in decades, opting instead for increasingly large, and increasingly late, “omnibus” packages, negotiated behind closed doors by legislative leadership, and pushed through during the holiday months.

“When you get an omnibus, they are the bills that nobody’s seen yet,” Maloy said. “These aren’t those kinds of bills.”

Sunday’s bills comprise roughly $450 billion of the $1.7 trillion spending total agreed to by legislative leadership in January, and would provide new spending policies for six government departments, including transportation, veterans affairs, energy, agriculture, and a few others, whose funding would otherwise dry up Friday at midnight.

The bills, negotiated by bipartisan committees from both chambers, represent a breakthrough for the nation’s top governing body which has struggled to fulfill its most basic legislative function of deciding how much money to spend on defense, government agencies and social programs.

Spending talks have been delayed, reversed or rejected amid deep disagreements within the House Republican Conference over how to leverage their slim two-seat majority to achieve spending cuts in divided government, with the Senate and White House under Democratic control.

“We’re gonna have to be very realistic about the hand we’re holding here,” Maloy said. “We have a small majority. And we can’t make any really big compromises because we’ll lose our own conference and we can’t hold a really hard line because we’ll never be able to get it done with the Senate.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has walked a fine line, often back tracking on his own initiatives, in an effort to secure conservative priorities, like spending cuts and border security provisions, while simultaneously staving off a government closure, which many believe could spell electoral disaster for Republicans.

But some of the conference’s most vocal fiscal hawks have called on Johnson to run head-first into a shutdown to force Democrats’ hand. Some of these same lawmakers, including Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane, have suggested that if Johnson moves forward with a compromise budget, which like likely receive more Democrat votes than Republican in the House, the speaker could face the same fate as his predecessor, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was ousted by a handful of GOP lawmakers in October for passing a Democrat-supported spending bill.

Such intra-party turmoil, however, doesn’t serve conservative interests, Maloy said.

“We’ve spent a lot of our time the last few months negotiating within our own conference so we don’t even get to the negotiations with the Senate,” Maloy said, later adding, “We’re just going to have to ... decide which things are hills to die on, and not everything can be a hill to die on. But we have to have cuts, we have to spend less.”

House Republican appropriators have touted Sunday’s six bills as the first overall cut to non-defense spending in nearly a decade. The budget proposals include cuts of 7% to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and 10% Environmental Protection Agency, compared to 2023 numbers. But total spending remains nearly the same as last year, with veteran’s affairs and women, infants, and children (WIC) programs receiving large funding increases.

Maloy said some of her colleagues have proposed a full-year continuing resolution, which would trigger automatic 1% spending cuts across the board, excluding defense spending, under the debt ceiling deal negotiated by McCarthy last year. While this outcome would ensure spending cuts, Maloy said, it ignores one of the most important parts of making a budget: deciding where money is spent, not just how much.

“Continuing resolutions keep us under Nancy Pelosi Congress’s priorities,” Maloy said. “We need to pass appropriations bills, one, because that’s our job, and two, because it helps us get those policy priorities from the Mike Johnson Congress into how agencies are operating, how the executive branch is doing its job.”

But even if the House, Senate and White House pass a budget six months late, they are already falling behind on where the budget process is supposed to be for 2025, Maloy said.

“We should be putting in our priorities for the 2025 appropriations bills, and we’re still working on 2024,” Maloy said. “And with it being an election year, it’s going to be even more intense because we’re behind on the appropriations schedule and we’re getting closer and closer to primaries where it’s harder for (lawmakers) to pay attention.”