House Caucus Backs Short-Term Funding Bill to Avoid Government Shutdown

Washington — The conservative House Freedom Caucus announced its official position on the upcoming… Fight for government funding on Monday, urging House Republican leaders to push through a stopgap measure to keep the government funded into the new year rather than passing a new overall funding package before the election.

The government funding deadline is Sept. 30, so lawmakers will face a financial showdown when they return from their August recess next month. And the deadline is further complicated by election-year politics.

In a statement Monday, the House Freedom Caucus, a small but vocal group of conservatives that has complicated recent funding fights for House Republicans, urged GOP leadership to “ensure that Democrats cannot undermine President Trump’s second term with a ‘lame duck’ omnibus in December” by pushing for a temporary measure to extend government funding through 2025.

“The House Freedom Caucus believes House Republicans should return to Washington to continue the work of passing the 12 appropriations bills to cut spending and advance our policy priorities,” the group said in the statement. But if Congress can’t do so in a matter of weeks, the group said, lawmakers should use a continuing resolution to extend the government funding deadline into the new year “to avoid a lame-duck omnibus that preserves Democratic spending and policies well into the next administration.”

A resolution to keep the government funded has been widely expected, and there is a long road ahead to passing the 12 appropriations bills to keep the government funded on Oct. 1. But how long the temporary measure will keep the government funded has yet to be determined. And with election season in full swing, appropriations work often falls off the priority list, while lawmakers are sometimes reluctant to pass new spending bills ahead of a potential shift in partisan control of the House, Senate and White House.

The Freedom Caucus also said the resolution in progress should include legislation to prevent non-citizens from voting, an issue that Republicans have highlighted in recent months despite the fact that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. The Freedom Caucus argued that House leaders should “use our leverage in the September spending fight to prevent non-citizens from voting in our elections.”

The development comes after the latest spending fight in Congress was especially protracted and ultimately wrapped in march after lawmakers repeatedly turned to short-term funding extensions to keep the government running while it was on the brink of shutdown on multiple occasions.