The powerful Senate Appropriations Committee is moving forward with plans to approve its first batch of funding bills for fiscal year 2025 next week, even as Republicans and Democrats struggle to reach a general agreement on how finance the government for much of the next year.
The committee is expected to set annual funding plans for the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, rural development, military construction and the legislature.
The legislation covers three of the dozens of annual spending proposals that negotiators plan to withdraw from committee over the summer, as both chambers work to ramp up their funding work for fiscal year 2025 before the closing deadline at the end of September.
The committee will also consider proposed allocations for each of the funding bills during the committee’s full markup session next Thursday. The vote comes at a time when Republican and Democratic lawmakers have not yet reached an overall funding agreement for the 2025 fiscal year.
However, the funding plans set to come out of committee in the coming weeks are expected to be much more bipartisan in nature than the fiscal year 2025 spending plans that have passed the House floor so far.
Last week, the House passed three bills establishing fiscal year 2025 funding for the departments of Homeland Security, Defense and State. However, the bills passed largely on party-line votes, as many Democrats came out in strong opposition to the House’s GOP funding proposals, which they criticized as being filled with partisan horsemen who they criticized as “poison pills.” .
The bills are also written at funding levels that Democrats say undermine a bipartisan agreement reached between the White House and Republican leadership last year to raise the debt limit and establish new spending limits.
On the Senate side, Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) emphasized the need for parity in defense and nondefense program increases for fiscal year 2025.
“The Appropriations Committee has already held nearly 40 hearings on the resources we will need in fiscal year 2025. We have discussed exactly what our nation needs to stay strong, safe and competitive,” she said last month.
“And there is one big obvious takeaway from these hearings, the [Fiscal Responsibility Act] the limits for FY24 are already causing serious problems and serious challenges, and the limits for FY25 are woefully inadequate,” she said.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
