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The On the Hill: Breaking Down DC podcast is a collection of sharing more about what’s happening in DC without the bias, ways for you to get involved with the US government, and interviews with friends, colleagues who can help pull back the proverbial curtain of Washington, DC. Katherine Getty, host of the OTH podcast, is a 10-year Washingtonian who lives and breathes politics.
00:01 - Katherine Getty
Hi and welcome to the On the Hill podcast with me, your host, katherine Getty. Each Thursday, I'll peel back the curtain of what happens in Washington, from breaking down current events without the bias to interviews with fellow political nerds and even, and maybe most importantly, ways for you to get involved with our US government. Welcome back to another episode of On the Hill Podcast with me, your host, katherine Getty, if you're listening in order. So this is episode 12, I'll continue the overview of the judicial branch soon. But last week in Washington was honestly one for the books, so I wanted to break in, give you the context without the bias, as usual. So I'll be covering government funding update. I feel like that's a common theme on this podcast and some shakeups in Washington that, I'll be honest, I did not see coming. So cue dramatic theme music, all right. So first, the funding Top line Congress, as of early Saturday morning last Saturday morning, was able to once again fund part of the government, which is awesome, and it finishes funding the government through the end of fiscal year 2024, which ends September 30th of this year. So, in earnest, fiscal year 2025 debate will start. So it's the song that never ends and we love that about appropriations. But I'll be honest though, the funding of fiscal year 2024 was down to the wire.
01:32
It took until Friday for the House to vote on the package and the Senate early Saturday morning before the president signed it. But you don't listen to the show for the highlights, you come for the context. So how did this come to pass, you might ask. Well, if you remember, back as of earlier this month, congress passed, the House and the Senate passed a package of bills funding part of the government. This was continuing the wait for it, continuing resolutions that funded in a laddered manner. So part of the government was funded and then part of the government was funded on a different date, and on March 22nd it was awesome to see that the House was voting on a bill to keep the second half of the government funded. So the package wasn't released until Thursday morning, which definitely causes some ire and concern because, members of Congress, you would expect our reading and staff are going through and understanding what the bills are before they're voting on it. So a Thursday morning release is tight, but it's doable. I think I saw, I heard somewhere on TV that if you were a normal reader, you could get through it in a day Not the most exciting things for most people, but funding the government is pretty important, so it is doable to get it voted upon on Friday morning.
02:58
And that package included the Department of Defense. It had Departments of Labor, health and Human Services, education, homeland Security, state and Foreign Operations, state and Foreign Ops, legislative Branch and Financial Services. To be honest, a lot of pundits said this is the thornier of the two different packages. I would say, as someone who does a lot of work in the healthcare space, I definitely think that there is some credence to that, but I would also say whichever package went first, they would say the second package is harder. That's just my own personal opinion on it. So I think it's always going to be difficult to get people to come to the table and say, okay, we're going to agree on X and you may be wanting to do Y. How can we bridge that gap?
03:49
Some interesting highlights coming out of the package. In regards to defense spending, the package includes more than $824 billion for defense, which is about a 3% increase, nearly $27 billion over current funding. So current funding is fiscal year 2023 appropriations and I think a good thing is that it includes a 5.2% pay raise for troops, plus a 5.4% increase in basic allowance for military housing. We all know that, as Americans, housing continues to be one of the biggest expenses we pay, and so I think it's good to see, from a military background, that you know they are getting some of that increases. Other highlights you know the largest non-defense funding bill is labor, health and human services and education, health and human services and education, and that total part of the bill is $225 billion. So $225 billion would go to departments of education, labor and health and human services. It's a slight decrease from current funding. Overall. You'll see HHS received a little bit more money, labor got a little less money, education would be funded like a little bit less. So it kind of equals out.
05:13
And I think it's important to remember House Republicans came in running on and saying that they would be cutting how much we're spending, and so you have that from a House Republican and then you see Senate Democrats wanting to invest in different pieces. Both of them can be right and valuable and important in our constitutional republic, but those are kind of their ways they came in. The Department of Homeland Security is another facet of this package and you'll see that department is receiving $90 billion. $20 billion in about response and recovery and then $62 billion that's not counting disaster funding or spending that's offset by fee collection. So it's kind of that traditional part of the package. The State Department will include more than $58 billion, a cut of 6% from current funding. The financial services portion of the package, which includes the Internal Revenue Service and I know we're all starting to think about our taxes coming up in April the IRS would receive $12.3 billion, the same as current levels. Ledge branch is getting a 2% cut from current funding. So that's the branch that funds operations for Congress and agencies that support it. But you'll see a part of that package. You know overall it's a 2% cut but you do see, you know pieces like the Capitol Police receiving an 8% uptick from current levels. That's a brief, brief overview of what the package includes.
06:50
But then what kind of happened on Friday? So BillTax released on Thursday. It included all of those aforementioned facets and I think on the whole people are like each side got a little bit of what they wanted. There's definitely I don't think either side would say this is what they would have wanted when they went to appropriations. But it's important to realize we're in divided government. Republicans control the House, democrats control the Senate and we have a Democrat in the White House. It's going to be a compromise bill, you would see. You saw on Friday morning a lot of more of the conservative House Freedom Caucus members balking at the bill, and the bill passed 286 to 134 in the House and there was not a majority of the majority. So think about the majority party is the House. A majority of those House members did not vote for the package. It's just a call out, it's not a condemnation. I think we need to realize that 286 members did vote for it and did want to see it move forward. And then you saw in the Senate another bipartisan kind of agreement on it. It was voted on early Saturday morning. I think. The vote ended up being 74 to 24 and two not voting, and then the president signed it.
08:17
I think there's going to be a little bit of a sigh of relief. One, that the government is not shutting down. I think it's always important to see that continue. I think. Two, a lot of people wanted to be done with fiscal year 2024 conversations and look towards fiscal year 2025 so that we are not in the same predicament in March of the. You know the fiscal year is rapidly going through and we haven't finished the fiscal year's funding. That's weird. You know, the fiscal year starts in October one and we're in March and we're just finishing it now. I think that's not how it's intended it's. I know it's not how it's intended to be done. So I think, on the whole, you're not going to hear about government funding for a little bit, hopefully. I know you're all thrilled about that, but I think it's an important call out of some of the context on some of the things that are happening. And I also think it's good to know the highlights of the bill, and I didn't go in deep. There are definitely a lot of different facets to the bills, to the bill and what's included, but those are some of the highlights. I think it's a lot of money and so I hope that it kind of helps you put into context where our government is spending our taxpayer dollars.
09:32
Okay, so, switching gears, we've talked about government funding. We're going to talk about some of the really interesting things that happened as of last week. So I think one is House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger, a Republican of Texas who's been in the House since in 1997. So a good portion of my life and she was a trailblazer. I think it's really inspiring to see that at the helm of appropriations in a Republican majority, you saw a woman. Congresswoman Granger has been around for a really long time and has seen different things and to be appropriations chair is really an honor. It is considered a top committee in Congress and she had earlier this year announced or late last year she's announced that she is going to be retiring. But following the package getting across the line and how she announced that she would be stepping down from appropriations chair, that is not something I have seen in my time in DC. I think it's pretty remarkable.
10:45
But you know her comments on making that step. She said and I'd like to quote you know, earlier this year I announced I will not seek reelection. As I said at that time, I will fulfill my commitment and serve through the end of this Congress. Recognizing that an election year often results in a final appropriations bill not getting enacted until well into the next fiscal year, it is important that I do everything in my power to ensure a seamless transition before the FY25 bill development begins in earnest. I therefore respectfully request that, as soon as possible, the GOP steering committee and conference select a new chair of the appropriations committee to serve out the remainder of the 118th Congress. So basically, what she is asking is you know, typically a steering committee is made up of many different parts of the House Republican Conference and Dems have something very similar but it's basically asking that group to meet in the middle of Congress to elect a new appropriation chair. That is not something that is very common. I think it's, I would argue, probably a really smart step, given where kind of the Congress is going, and it provides that next, whoever that next chair will be, some time and some runway before the 119th Congress starts in 2025.
12:04
That, I will say, was really shocking to me, so I wanted to share it with you, and I think that kind of brings into context something I also want to talk on, which is retirements. I think we've seen a lot of conversation about the retirements happening on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers House and Senate but it's really on par for where it's been in the past. It's slightly up higher than it was in 2022. But as of March 22nd 2024, 49 members of Congress, eight members of the Senate, 41 members of the House, had announced they would not seek reelection in 2024. If you go back to 2022, in February of 2022, 42 House members so just one more more had announced they were not seeking re-election at that time.
12:57
I think it's definitely interesting to see where things are shaking out and I think there is a lot of institutional knowledge being lost in this Congress and for that I am selfishly sad. But I think I say that because I think it gives some context to where it's at. I don't have the figure on how many senators had announced at that point, but I think it gives kind of a context. It's only one above where it was in 2022. So it's really a line and I think is it getting higher? Are there reasons for that? Maybe, and I think that that's maybe sometimes why I have this podcast is I want to take down the temperature, I want to cut out the bias. I want to just give you the facts and figures because I think it's easy to say okay, well, that party has more people leaving. There must be a problem. It's on both sides. One other thing, one other retirement that I think sent some shockwaves through Washington last week was select subcommittee chairman Mike Gallagher. A Republican of Wisconsin, announced that he would be retiring as of April of this year. I think that makes the House Republican Conference even smaller, but functionally a one vote majority is the same as a few vote majority, so they're kind of working with the same, the same issues that they were before. I think there will be a lot in the news about it, um, but you know, republicans remain in control of the house. So busy, busy week in Washington and I probably only scratched the surface of what happened, but this week I talked about government funding, change in an appropriation share in the House and some of the retirements, including one of the latest Congressman, mike Gallagher.
14:50
As always, tune in next week to another episode of the On the Hill podcast where I give you the context of what's happening in Washington without the bias. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for tuning in each week. It means so much to me. I really enjoy getting to share with you my love, my nerding of politics. If there's ever anything that you're interested in, please find me on Instagram. The podcast handle is onthehildcpodcast we can message there. Or the podcast handle is on the hill DC podcast we can message there. Or my own personal handle is at Catherine Getty on Instagram. And don't forget to tune in next week to another episode of on the hill podcast.