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By Katie Cross, Senior Associate,
Blakey & Agnew
New Year, new Congress! But, same federal government shutdown. On January 3, the 116th Congress was sworn into office, leading to the typical settling in period - Members are moving offices, being assigned to committees, and industry stakeholders are conducting educational efforts to ensure all lawmakers, both new and old, are up to speed on their topics of interest. But this new Congress is not starting with a blank slate; instead they kicked off with a federal government that is partially shut down. The 115th Congress failed to pass all necessary appropriations bills prior to the midnight, December 21, 2018 deadline set by the most recent continuing resolution (continuing resolutions fund the federal government at the previous year's appropriation levels for a finite period in order to give lawmakers more time to come to a full-year deal).
The 115th Congress was able to agree upon and pass fiscal year 2019 appropriations for some federal departments. However, seven bills are still pending, including the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) bill, the Agriculture and Rural Development bill, and the Homeland Security Bill, among others. The 115th Congress came to an agreement on six of the seven pending bills but disagreement over funding for a border wall reportedly caused the negotiations to break down. Therefore, after the December 21 deadline passed with no deal, portions of the federal government shut down.
As of this writing, the partial federal government shutdown is still in effect, totaling almost 16 days – a timeline that is nearing the longest federal government shutdown in history, which took place between December 1995 – January 1996 and lasted 21 days. On January 3, the House of Representatives introduced two bills aimed at ending the shutdown. One was an omnibus package that combined the full-year appropriations proposals for six of the seven not-yet-passed bills. The text of the six bills seems to match the text of the Senate versions that were introduced in 2018. The second bill would have provided funding for the Department of Homeland Security (under which the border
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security issue falls) at fiscal year 2018 levels through early February 2019. According to a joint statement from the Senate and House Democratic leaders, their intention with these two bills was to reopen all federal departments and allow Congress to separate negotiations over border security from funding for the rest of the federal government. Both bills passed the House but the President indicated he would not sign such bills into law. Senate leadership said they would not take up any bill unless the House has indications from President Trump that he would not veto the legislation.
According to a HuffPost/YouGov survey taken about a week into the partial shutdown, Americans generally disapprove of both Congress and the President's handling of the shutdown. In fact, 60 percent of those polled disapproved of how Congress has handled the shutdown, while 49 percent disapproved of how the President has handled it.
This stands in stark contrast to the American public's views on infrastructure spending: 79 percent of Americans polled said increasing infrastructure spending should be an "extremely important priority" for the new Congress. That's according to a poll conducted by Politico and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. This notion crossed party lines, ranking high among topics of extreme importance with Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. In fact, among all the topics in the survey, increasing infrastructure investment saw the third highest number of respondents calling for it to be an "extremely important priority."
Blakey & Agnew, LLC is a public affairs and
communications consulting firm based in
Washington, DC.
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