Congressional Leaders Reach Agreement On Topline Spending Number

Congressional leaders have taken an important step toward approving a budget for the remainder of the fiscal year, but there’s still plenty of work to do to prevent parts of the government from shutting down next week.

To have any chance of passing something other than another stopgap funding measure, which Speaker Mike Johnson has said he won’t do, Senate and House leaders had to first agree on a topline number—the total amount Congress is going to appropriate for the 2024 fiscal year, which started Oct. 1.

They finally did that Sunday.

One of the reasons Kevin McCarthy was ousted as Speaker last fall was that the far right felt the spending limits he agreed to with President Biden in the debt ceiling deal (aka, Fiscal Responsibility Act) weren't severe enough.

Following a day at the border last week, McCarthy's successor told CBS's Face the Nation it's on Congress to get U.S. debt under control.

"We have the power of the purse, of course," Speaker Johnson (R-LA) told host Margaret Brennan, "and we have to be good stewards of precious taxpayer resources. We cannot continue to borrow money to spend it. And so reducing non-defense discretionary spending must be a priority of Congress. And we're trying to insist upon that in these negotiations."

Ultimately, those negotiations led to an agreement on a topline number very similar to the one McCarthy and Biden agreed on -- $1.66 trillion in total discretionary spending. $886 billion of that for defense and $773 billion for non-defense items.

Democratic leaders see this as a win, as they were able to fend off deeper cuts called for by the far right, while Johnson is touting the fact that the agreement speeds up cuts to the IRS and takes back $6.1 billion in unused COVID-19 monies.

Now, the question is, with a topline in place, can House and Senate leaders reconcile the twelve appropriations bills quickly enough to beat the two funding deadlines: Jan, 19 and Feb. 2.

Meanwhile, the House Freedom Caucus is bashing the agreement, posting on social media, "It’s even worse than we thought....This is total failure."

The two members of Oklahoma’s delegation most likely to be concerned with this agreement are Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK1) and Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK2). We'll here from each of them later this week.