Trump 'Poised To Sign' Giant $1.4 Trillion Spending Deal, According to White House
One day before Wednesday’s monumental vote on impeachment, House Republicans and Democrats found something to agree upon — spending money.
The House on Tuesday approved two separate budget bills that would fund government operations through September.
The legislation now goes to the Senate, which must act by Friday, when the current stopgap bill that has kept government running will expire.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell supports the deal.
“The list goes on and on,” the Kentucky Republican said, referring to narrowly tailored tax credits and incentives, according to The Washington Post.
President Donald Trump expects to sign the bill, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Tuesday.
“The president is poised to sign it to keep the government open,” Conway told reporters, according to The Hill.
The budget gives Trump $1.4 billion to erect new parts of his border wall project, the New York Post reported.
It also give Trump the ability to access defense-related accounts to boost the amount of construction done.
“A year after [Democrats] called it a manufactured crisis, the president is getting $1.375 billion for his wall, and they didn’t mess with his authorities at all,” Conway said. “There’s a lot of good stuff in there.”
To some, the wall funding was a bridge too far, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“Many members of the CHC will vote against it,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, told The Associated Press.
“It’s true that there are a lot of good things and Democratic victories in the spending agreement. I think everybody appreciates those. What members of the Hispanic Caucus are concerned with is the wall money, the high level of detention beds, and most of all with the ability of the president to transfer money both to wall and to detention beds in the future.”
Fiscal conservatives attacked bill for adding to the federal debt, which reached $21.6 trillion at the end of the 2018 fiscal year, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Two full months into the current fiscal year, the federal government is already $343 billion in the red, the Treasury Department reported.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit group, took issue with the spending package’s “zombie tax extenders” — short-term tax cuts that never go away — which it said can raise the federal debt $400 billion in the 10 years.
“What a bucket of garbage this bill is,” the group’s president, Maya MacGuineas, tweeted.
What a bucket of garbage this bill is. https://t.co/IS1bgFu1jm via @NYTimes
— Maya MacGuineas (@MayaMacGuineas) December 17, 2019
There is smart tax reform. Then there are good tax policies that would makes sense if offset. And then there are the absolutely ridiculous “zombie extenders” – temporary tax breaks that will not die, that when enacted retroactively, are simply moronic. https://t.co/ekj9ZlzUTE
— Maya MacGuineas (@MayaMacGuineas) December 17, 2019
The bill includes various items to placate members of both parties.
For Democrats, the budget will fund $25 million in gun violence research, give civilian federal employees a 3.1 percent pay hike and set records for the federal investment in programs such as Head Start.
For Republicans, it also raises Pentagon funding by $22 billion and repeals several taxes that were part of Obamacare.
The 2,371-page spending package also include a new law raising the national age to buy tobacco to 21.
The new legislation will apply to e-cigarettes and vaping devices, though it does not, however, ban flavored vaping products.
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