Lawmakers Still Billions Apart on 2023 Spending

By Yuval Rosenberg

This Tuesday has been teeming with news. Polls in the Georgia Senate runoff race between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker are about to close. Former President Donald Trump’s company was convicted of tax fraud. And Morocco became the first Arab country and fourth African nation to reach the quarterfinals of the World Cup, defeating powerhouse Spain.

Here’s what else we’re monitoring.

Dems, GOP Still Billions Apart on 2023 Spending

Federal funding runs out in 10 days and lawmakers working on a deal to set government spending levels through next September reportedly remain far apart. “At the moment, Democrats are asking for about $26 billion overall more than GOP lawmakers are willing to give,” Politico reports.

Lawmakers also haven’t yet moved forward on the annual defense authorization bill, which has passed for 60 years straight.

“With regard to all the issues that are swirling around, let me just say that we’re at a pretty significant impasse,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said at a news conference Tuesday.

McConnell had told reporters a week ago that there was “widespread agreement” during a White House meeting between President Joe Biden and congressional leaders on the need to pass a so-called omnibus annual spending bill rather than a stopgap spending measure.

Republicans aren’t in agreement on that, though. House and Senate conservatives have urged McConnell to push for a short-term funding extension that would delay broader spending talks until after Republicans take control of the House next year and can exert more leverage over fiscal decisions.

“Wait till we’re in charge,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said during an appearance on Fox News Monday night. “We would be stronger in every negotiation, so any Republican that’s out there trying to work with them is wrong.”

McConnell on Tuesday said that a stopgap continuing resolution running into next year might be needed, though he insisted that suggestion was more about practical concerns than intraparty pressure.

“Time is ticking,” he said. “We have not been able to agree on a topline yet, and I think it’s becoming increasingly likely that we may need to do a short-term CR into early next year. We are running out of time and that may end up being the only option left that we could agree to pursue.

Incoming House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York told reporters that it’s too soon to look at punting spending talks into next year. Jeffries said there are still several weeks left in the year, “which is an eternity in Washington, D.C.” and that McConnell’s mention of a continuing resolution was “premature.”

Why it matters: “Without a deal,” Politico’s Caitlin Emma writes, “congressional leaders have warned that federal agencies could be saddled with stagnant budgets for the better part of 2023, an outcome that Pentagon leaders have said would be devastating for military readiness and U.S. assistance to Ukraine.”

A Controversial Deal to Repeal the Pentagon’s Vaccine Mandate

The $847 billion National Defense Authorization Act for 2023 appears poised to move forward with at least one thorny provision attached to it: House Democrats, in a compromise with Republicans, are reportedly allowing language that would repeal the Pentagon’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate.

The Biden administration and the Pentagon have both come out against undoing the mandate, which was put in place by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in August 2021. But Republicans dug in on the issue, with McCarthy saying Sunday that the defense bill “will not move” if it does not lift the mandate. “The compromise is effectively a loss for the White House and Pentagon,” The Hill’s Ellen Mitchell writes.

Still, the path ahead for the NDAA remains somewhat clouded by Democratic leadership’s potential plan to include an energy-permitting reform plan proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in the legislation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had agreed to push the plan this summer in order to win Manchin’s backing for the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democratic climate, health care and tax bill.

The permitting reforms face opposition from dozens of House Democrats as well as from environmental groups. Democrats also need at least 10 Republican votes to get the NDAA through the Senate. McConnell told reporters Tuesday that lawmakers were “screwing up the NDAA by trying to drop a lot of unrelated things on it.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the retiring top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, reportedly said he would vote against the NDAA, which is named in his honor this year, if the permitting legislation is included.

Column of the Day: Roasting the Lame Duck

The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell takes aim today at the biennial congressional cram session known as the lame duck. Noting that this year’s agenda includes far too many items than can actually be addressed in such a short period of time, she writes that the pattern of punting everything until the very end of a congressional session highlights how horrible our governance is most of the time:

“Why are all these allegedly must-pass, often popular priorities crammed into this narrow window? Why does so much of the basic plumbing of government rely on a weeks-long period before every other Christmas? Why can’t lawmakers spread this stuff — or at least some of it — across the rest of the time they’re supposed to be working?
“The problem isn’t merely that politicians procrastinate until a deadline (or crisis) forces their hand. It’s also that lame-duck sessions reinforce very low expectations for Congress most of the year, perhaps even incentivizing foot-dragging and obstructionism. … So everything gets shoehorned into this brief period, and the calendar gets oversubscribed, and important bills never pass. What a horrible way to run a country, where basically the only hope of enacting critical policies — or for politicians to simply do their jobs — is a brief window around the holidays every two years.”

Read the full column at The Washington Post.

As Covid Funds Dry Up, Uninsured Go ‘Back to the Old Ways’

The U.S. has spent about $25 billion to vaccinate, test and treat the uninsured during the Covid-19 pandemic, but with federal funds drying up and Congress declining to provide additional resources, many people without insurance are finding themselves unable to afford the health care they need.

“We’re back to the old ways,” Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, told Noah Weiland and Sarah Kliff of The New York Times. “People are going without vitally important services, and/or they’re going into debt for the rest of their lives.”

A program run by the Department of Health and Human Services providing funds for testing and treatment for the uninsured shut down earlier this year, and in September the federal government stopped providing free Covid testing kits for all Americans, Weiland and Kliff report. Although booster shots and the Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid are still available at no cost, the supply will eventually run out. Meanwhile, the uninsured face potentially ruinous bills for basic services in the country’s Wild West of a health care system, with tests costing as much as $3,000 each and the price of hospitalization reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The problem is particularly acute in the states that have refused to expand their Medicaid programs, as allowed by the Affordable Care Act. Kody H. Kinsley, who leads the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, told the Times that the pandemic-related federal spending on health care enabled the state “to temporarily create a bright spot for care,” but the effect “is slowly vanishing.”

FDA Needs a Major Overhaul, Watchdog Says

The Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of the U.S. food industry is severely lacking, with shortcomings so significant that the organization should consider a major restructuring, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

The scathing analysis was produced by the Reagan-Udall Foundation, an independent watchdog created by Congress 15 years ago to provide oversight and advice for the FDA. Last July, the foundation commissioned an independent panel to review the FDA’s Human Foods Program, following the FDA’s failure to maintain the supply of infant formula earlier in the year. Its analysis was released Tuesday.

Among the many problems identified in the report, the expert panel found that the FDA’s food program lacks both strong leadership and a clear sense of mission. “The lack of a clear overarching leader of the Human Foods Program has contributed to a culture of indecisiveness and inaction and created disincentives for collaboration,” the report’s authors said.

As a result, the FDA is slow to respond to threats to the food supply and avoids making tough decisions on enforcement. Taken together, the problems mean that the agency falls short in its primary mission of protecting public health, the report says. 

The panel recommends restructuring the food program to centralize leadership. It also says the program needs more funding from Congress in order to accomplish its mission.

In response to the report, FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf thanked the panel for its analysis and said it “will help to inform a new vision” for the program to be announced in January. “This new vision and structure will be built on the external evaluation being released today; the internal review of the agency’s infant formula supply chain response completed in September, which has already resulted in noticeable improvements in our operations across the Foods Program; and ongoing work that allows the agency to take advantage of emerging advances in food science, with a goal of designing a system that allows us to more quickly adapt to an ever-changing and evolving environment,” Califf wrote.

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