WASHINGTON — The House is committed to voting on the fiscal 2022 omnibus spending bill Wednesday. There’s just one problem: It’s not finalized yet.
Appropriations staff worked through the night Monday and into Tuesday morning to try to finalize text for the massive spending package, which will appropriate roughly $1.5 trillion across defense and nondefense government accounts, more than $12 billion in emergency funding for the Ukraine crisis and $15 billion in largely reprogrammed COVID-19 aid.
“Republicans and Democrats continue making good progress towards reaching a deal to fund the government. We are almost there. We are very, very close, and hopefully it will be done in the next few hours,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer said in floor remarks Tuesday morning.
Shortly before Schumer spoke, House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., delivered a similar message in a private House Democratic Caucus meeting.
“I think I’m OK in quoting Rosa [DeLauro] in saying we are 98% there,” Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee Chair David E. Price, D-N.C., said leaving the meeting.
DeLauro was adamant in her brief remarks to reporters that the House would vote Wednesday.
“We’re almost done. We’re going to vote tomorrow,” she said. “It’s not going to get delayed. We’re going to vote tomorrow.”
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters on a press call about an hour after the caucus meeting that the omnibus was still being written and “hopefully will be ready in hours and will be ready to be considered tomorrow.”
The House is scheduled to adjourn midday Wednesday so Democrats can travel to their annual issues conference in Philadelphia.
Hoyer warned Democrats during the caucus meeting Tuesday that there’s a slim chance they may need to return for a Friday session if the Senate were to amend the omnibus or get bogged down in procedural delays that would necessitate a short-term stopgap.
“We intend to return, if necessary, to the Congress on Friday to take any action that is needed, either by the return of a Senate bill or by some necessity to pass a short-term effort, which I think would be harmful to the country,” Hoyer told reporters after the meeting. “And when I say short-term, I mean very short-term because a lot of work has been done."
But the possibility of a stopgap couldn’t be completely ruled out as appropriators were still haggling over the final pieces of the omnibus Tuesday.
“It is so damn close that I would love to say it’s done, but there are some minor issues out there that will be resolved,” Senate Defense Appropriations Chair Jon Tester, D-Mont., said of his panel’s bill. “They’re so minor I don’t even know what the hell they are.”
Tester predicted that the issues won’t take long to resolve and that the entire package could still be finalized Tuesday but he wasn’t 100 percent sure.
Schumer, meanwhile, indicated progress had been made on the COVID-19 aid, which had remained a sticking point in negotiations on Monday.
“I believe the COVID funding will go down as one of the most important ... elements of the omnibus,” he said. “All that’s needed is the federal funding and over $15 billion of that funding will be in the omnibus bill.”
Schumer’s comments suggest negotiators have decided to underfund the administration’s $22.5 billion request for “immediate” pandemic needs, but that Congress will likely debate more COVID-19 supplemental appropriations in the near future.
Schumer added negotiators are “close, very close, to passing a strong and ample aid package that will help the people of Ukraine fight against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s immoral war.”
Negotiators agreed to boost the total by roughly $2 billion from the initial White House request. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also touted the Ukraine aid in his floor remarks Tuesday, saying Schumer worked "in good faith" to provide more money for security assistance to Ukraine and other U.S. allies in the region.
Hoyer said the $12 billion figure "is certainly not going to be the final cost, but it's an initial contribution."
As the omnibus was nearly done, the likelihood of any tax measures making it in appeared increasingly low. DeLauro and other lawmakers were unaware of a tax title as of Tuesday morning, and outside sources predicted tax provisions would not be added.
There is broad bipartisan support for provisions such as renewing full expensing of corporate research and development costs, which lapsed at the start of the year.
But there's also pushback among Democrats to moving business tax breaks before restoring provisions like the more generous child tax credit paid in monthly installments. The child tax credit disappeared at the beginning of 2022 after objections from Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., stalled a broader budget package.
Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of liberal groups, said in a series of tweets Tuesday that restoring R&D expensing in the omnibus would be a "slap in the face" to families who lost the child tax credit.
And Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wants his panel to have more input on a bipartisan package of retirement savings incentives that House Ways and Means Committee members approved unanimously last year and wanted to attach to the omnibus.
A retirement package could still move on its own given broad support in both chambers, And the U.S. industrial and manufacturing competitiveness bill that the House and Senate are negotiating, a separate tax "extenders" bill, or a possible reconstituted budget reconciliation package, are potential vehicles for business breaks including the R&D expensing fix.
Hoyer said leadership is hoping to have a bicameral agreement on the competitiveness package to advance by summer as well as a deal on a new version of what used to be called the "Build Back Better" reconciliation bill.
DeLauro said House leaders had not made a decision on whether to use a procedure known as “dividing the question” to hold separate votes on the defense and nondefense portions of the package, which would then merge back into a single bill before it is sent to the Senate. Nor did that come up in caucus, members said.
The decision to separate the votes is more complicated by the Ukraine aid, which progressive Democrats who don’t typically support the primary defense budget would be inclined to support.
“I tend to vote no on the defense piece, so I always appreciate the opportunity to vote no on that,” Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., said. “However, at this moment, if that’s where they found the Ukrainian aid supplemental, it’d be hard not to support it.”
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(Paul M. Krawzak contributed to this report.)
