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What started out as a simple stopgap measure to avert a shutdown for a few months became a magnet for more than $100 billion in emergency disaster and farm aid, plus a host of unrelated policy measures.
Dec. 17, 2024, 8:21 p.m. ET
Congressional leaders on Tuesday unveiled legislation that would keep government funding flowing through the middle of March and provide nearly $100 billion in aid for communities ravaged by hurricanes and other disasters.
Negotiators in both parties had been toiling to reach a deal ahead of a Friday deadline to avert a shutdown. The sprawling bill, more than 1,500 pages, includes $10 billion in direct economic assistance for farmers and another $21 billion in disaster relief for farmers. It would keep government funding at current levels, and would punt another funding fight until March 14, when the Republican-controlled Congress will have to come to another spending agreement.
It is also stuffed with an array of unrelated policy measures on health, energy, digital privacy and other matters that lawmakers quietly agreed to slip in as part of a final round of haggling in the last days of the Congress, powered by billions in federal money and a collective desire to clear the legislative decks before the new year.
The result was that even before leaders unveiled the legislation on Tuesday, it appeared that Speaker Mike Johnson could face mass defections from his members. A number of House Republicans, including some mainstream conservatives, said that they would not support the deal because it crammed too many policies into one massive bill.
Mr. Johnson made his case for the legislation to lawmakers, arguing that Congress was dutybound to respond to what he called “acts of God,” including the pair of hurricanes that battered the Southeast this fall and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in March.
“It was intended to be, and it was, until recent days, a very simple, very clean C.R., stopgap funding measure to get us into next year when we have unified government,” he said at a news conference, using the shorthand for a continuing resolution to keep federal funding flowing. “We had these massive hurricanes in the late fall, Helene and Milton, and other disasters. We have to make sure that the Americans that were devastated by these hurricanes get the relief they need.”
