Congress has until midnight on March 14 to avoid a partial government shutdown.
House Republicans revealed a Trump-approved spending bill on March 8 that lays out a plan to keep the federal government and its agencies funded through the end of the fiscal year.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wants his chamber to vote on the 100-page continuing resolution (CR) on March 11, while Democrats, led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) already stand in opposition.
Congress has until midnight on March 14 to avoid a partial government shutdown.
“All Republicans should vote (Please!) YES next week. Great things are coming for America, and I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on March 8.
“Democrats will do anything they can to shut down our Government, and we can’t let that happen. We have to remain UNITED — NO DISSENT — Fight for another day when the timing is right. VERY IMPORTANT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
According to House Republican leadership staff on a March 8 background call, the CR would allow for $892.5 billion in defense spending and about $708 billion for nondefense spending. This is a slight increase in defense allocations and an approximately 8 percent drop in nondefense spending compared to last year.
Staff also said that the CR did not include side agreements such as raising the debt ceiling or cushioning certain nondefense programs. Funding requests for thousands of community projects made by individual lawmakers, known as earmarks, also appear to have been excluded.
Programs such as Social Security and Medicare are not covered by this legislation.
“We’re looking to pass a clean CR to freeze funding at current levels to make sure that the government can stay open while we begin to incorporate all these savings that we’re finding through the DOGE effort and these other sources of revenue that President [Donald] Trump’s policies are bringing to the table,” Johnson told NBC’s Meet the Press on March 2.
By T.J. Muscaro
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