Over the weekend, House Republican leaders unveiled their latest Fiscal Year 2025 stop-gap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown when the current fiscal year ends on September 30th. H.R. 9747, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025, would maintain federal funding at current levels through December 20th—three months shorter than last week’s draft resolution, which the House rejected.

While Speaker Johnson (R-LA) has described the latest bill as “a very narrow, bare-bones CR including only the extensions that are absolutely necessary,” the portion of the bill detailing extensions/adjustments to funding is more than twice as long as the previous version (49 pages compared to 23). The House stripped out provisions from last week’s version preventing undocumented immigrants from voting, a practice already illegal and rare, and replaced them with 26 pages of extensions for numerous Veteran’s health care, Medicare, and Medicaid programs that would otherwise expire.

Perhaps the most notable feature of the CR is what it does not contain—new funding.

• FEMA does not get extra funding for disaster relief. Section 134 of the CR lets FEMA use approximately $22 billion in FY25 appropriations for the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) to respond to existing and future disasters. Unfortunately, FEMA projected a $6 billion shortfall for FY24. Last week’s draft included $10 billion in emergency funds for the DRF, but that’s been dropped. Now, FY25 funds will cover FY24 disasters, kicking-the-can down the road, which could come back to bite them if 2025 brings another active disaster, such as Tropical Storm Helene that is predicted to make landfall as a hurricane later this week.

• The 2025 spending caps stay intact, but some money is moved around. Perhaps the most obvious, and common sense, anomaly is the $100+ million set aside across several agencies for Presidential Inauguration security and administrative transition activities.

• $231 million in additional election security funding for the Secret Service. This “is in addition to amounts otherwise provided by (the CR)” but since it isn’t designated an emergency, it still counts against the annual spending caps. Like with FEMA, this means that funds will be shifted within the Secret Service and DHS to cover presidential election security, creating potential shortfalls that lawmakers and the agency will have to address in a future spending bill.

• No new emergency spending. Despite lawmakers clamoring for more emergency spending on top of regular appropriations, the CR includes none. Senate appropriators had proposed $34 billion designated as “emergency spending” ($21 billion for defense, $13.5 billion for non-defense).

H.R. 9747 is a relatively clean stopgap to keep the government running past the election. It doesn’t tackle the toughest spending decisions, but with just days left in the fiscal year and a Congress more prone to dysfunction than debate, passing this and moving on may be the best outcome we can hope for.