Senate passes its first spending bills, but battles lie ahead

WASHINGTON – The Senate o n Friday overwhelmingly passed the first of its spending bills for the coming year, with bipartisan approval of measures to fund military construction projects, veterans and agriculture programs and legislative branch agencies.

But the broad agreement over the $488 billion package of bills, typically the least controversial of the annual federal spending measures, masked a bitter fight in Congress over how to fund the government past a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.

Senators pushed through the legislation after several intense days of haggling as part of an agreement to allow the chamber to make progress on funding the government before senators leave Washington for a monthlong summer recess.

“We are on the verge of an accomplishment that we have not done since 2018 – and that is pass appropriation bills across the Senate floor prior to the August recess,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, said on the floor.

Still, debate over the package hinted at the bigger spending challenges that lie ahead.

Democrats, furious about the White House’s efforts to subvert Congress’ power of the purse, are wary of striking spending deals with Republicans when President Donald Trump and his team have signaled they intend to continue ignoring or defying lawmakers’ spending dictates, even those enacted into law. And Republicans are fighting among themselves over how closely to hew to the Trump administration’s spending targets.

The package approved Friday night would provide $433 billion for veterans programs, with about $300 billion of it mandatory spending to fund veterans benefits; $19.8 billion for military construction and family housing projects; $27.1 billion for agricultural programs; and $7.1 billion for the operations of Congress and legislative agencies.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., tried and failed to apply a 2% cut to congressionally appropriated funds in the agriculture bill.

And before any of the bills could be brought to the floor, Kennedy insisted on a separate vote on the one to fund the legislative branch, just so he could record his opposition to the funding level, which he argued was too high. That measure passed by a vote of 81-15, while the rest of the bills were approved by a vote of 87-9.

Separately, an effort by Senate leaders to include a fourth bill in the package, one that would fund the Commerce and Justice departments and the science agencies, fell short after an objection from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

Senate leaders will most likely have to contend with even more dissent as they labor to pass nine more spending bills through their chamber. But even if they pass, the House has been advancing funding bills that set drastically lower funding levels than the Senate, and differences between the bills will need to be ironed out before they can be enacted.

That tension is evident in the bill to fund legislative branch agencies, including the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that helps Congress keep track of federal spending and is in an intense battle with the White House over the administration’s efforts to usurp Congress’ spending powers.

GAO investigators have determined on multiple occasions in recent months that the Trump administration illegally withheld funds that Congress had allocated.

The White House has been working to stymie the agency, and House Republicans have written a legislative branch spending bill that would roughly halve funding for the GAO, to $415.4 million. The legislation that passed the Senate on Friday evening would keep the agency’s funds more or less level, at $811.9 million.

Before Friday’s votes, Collins acknowledged that gaps between Senate and House bills would need to be addressed.

Thanking her colleagues for their bipartisan spirit, Collins said she was hopeful that the House and Senate could use their August recess to resolve differences so that Congress could “get these bills signed into law” before a shutdown deadline.

“That’s the way the system should work,” she added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.