As we wrote earlier this week, Congress is back from Thanksgiving and dealing with a whole lot of legislative leftovers. 

Today, House and Senate leadership have reached agreement on a bill to keep the federal government running through the middle of next February. This is the third-best scenario, but we’re stuck with it.  

• The best would be Congress passing the individual appropriations bills prior to the beginning of the fiscal year.  

• The second-best would be Congress having done the work since the beginning of the fiscal year, under the current Continuing Resolution (CR) to pass the individual appropriations bills. 
• Third-best is what Congress will begin considering today: another CR that funds the government through February 18, 2022, giving them another two months to “negotiate.” Right. 

If we believed that the Senate Appropriators would now put their shoulders to the wheel and start passing individual appropriations bills, this would give us some hope. If there’s a betting line in Vegas for this, put our money on Congress not getting serious about funding the government until about February 1st. We’re not worried about losing that bet. By then the federal government will have been running on virtual budgetary auto-pilot for nearly five months. This affects planning, hiring, continues unnecessary spending, and prevents necessary spending. And then agencies turn around to spend any extra cash over previous year’s level in half a year. CRs aren’t a victimless crime. This is fiscal lunacy. 

As always happens, a list of so-called “anomalies” crops up and the language of the CR includes certain exceptions to the rule that such legislation is supposed to run all federal programs exactly how they were funded, and for what purposes, in the previous fiscal year. The list is fairly short this round and avoids most major sticking points, apparently to build pressure on getting a final deal.    

The big exception in this bill appears to be an additional $4.3 billion for the Pentagon to welcome and care for Afghan evacuees housed on U.S. military installations. We know this is a new requirement for the Pentagon, but we also know there is wiggle room in the Fiscal Year 2021 Pentagon budget of well over $700 billion. And we firmly believe the needs of the evacuees could be met if Defense officials ran a thorough reprogramming exercise to whisk that money out of the couch cushions and then asked for the authority to spend it on this new requirement. But, because the Pentagon considers all new requirements to be additive to its budget, and because Congress lets them get away with it, here we are. 

Afghan evacuees and their care also requires increases to other federal departments: 

• $147 million at Department of Homeland Security 
• $1,308 million across the Departments of Labor, Health & Human Services and Education 
• $1.3 billion for the State Department 

We point out that these other federal departments have much smaller discretionary budgets than the Pentagon and are less likely to have funds stashed away for a rainy day. But we would still like to know that a through budget scrub for a potential reprogramming happened before Congress agreed to cough up this additional $2.6 billion. 

The other anomalies consist of extensions of various waivers and prohibitions and the repeal of a prohibition in one case. Most are pro forma and nothing to write home about, but we did find one amusing: 

“Extension of Antideficiency Act Exemption for the Universal Service Fund.”. The Antideficiency Act, as we’ve written many times, prohibits the obligation of federal funds in advance or excess of Congressional appropriations action. Evidently the Federal Communications Commission has been operating under an exemption of that Act to deliver broadband to “schools, libraries, health care institutions, and rural areas.” We strongly believe broadband should be widely available, so perhaps the Congress should codify this program so it doesn’t need an exemption, But, hey, we’re just happy Congress is reminding everyone the Antideficiency Act exists! We were getting a little lonely in our corner, writing and tweeting about it. Maybe we can get some of that infrastructure money and build a club house. Who’s in? 

One thing this Continuing Resolution does not do is deal with our looming crisis over the debt ceiling. And we do mean crisis. That needs to be next. Watch this space.