Government Shutdown Averted For Now
Military paychecks were potentially due to stop coming in October because of lawmakers’ inability to find a solution to fund the federal government, but that has been delayed for now.
Under a stopgap funding measure passed in the last full week of September 2024, the government will stay open for a while longer. The House and Senate approved a temporary, three-month federal budget that expires on December 20, 2024, ensuring (among many other things) that military paychecks will keep coming. For now.
That stopgap resolution does not provide unlimited funding for military operations; under any continuing resolution (the technical name for the funding measure) no new programs can be funded and many ongoing programs may be negatively affected.
The stopgap resolution allows lawmakers more time to work on a full-year budget.
Some note that the federal government has had an entire year to do this, but due to partisan infighting and the insistence of some factions in the House on introducing irrelevant riders into the bill that full year’s worth of opportunity went to waste in 2024.
What Stopgap Funding Does
Thanks to the current spending bill, military paychecks will not stop in October. The measure also prevents “nonessential activities” from being suspended. Both options are on the table if there isn’t a budget by December 20, 2024.
Stopgap funding bills are decidedly unpopular with the men and women who have to do the daily work of planning and funding military operations. Under a temporary funding measure, procurement and new projects cannot happen, which directly affects readiness.
Army Times reports the Defense Secretary is taking issue with temporary funding.
SecDef Disagrees With Continuing Resolution
“Asking the department to compete with (China), let alone manage conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, while under a lengthy continuing resolution, ties our hands behind our back while expecting us to be agile and to accelerate progress,”
That’s according to a letter Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote to lawmakers in early September. Austin also notes a specific failure of those in Washington. “We have already lost valuable time, having operated under 48 continuing resolutions for a total of almost five years, since 2011,”
Partisan Infighting Delays Government Funding
As NBC News reports, a continuing resolution requires a two-thirds majority to pass in the House, because the resolution was passed under a suspension of the usual rules thanks to partisan bickering.
Along those lines, the House voted down a stopgap funding bill offered prior to the one approved by both the House and Senate. That version, according to NBC News, “combined government funding and the SAVE Act last week…”
The SAVE Act is an unrelated-to-federal-spending bill that caused controversy with its introduction to the continuing resolution. House factions eventually gave in (a common pattern over the last three years) and allowed the Act to be stripped out of successive versions of the CR.
What’s Next?
The continuing resolution expires on December 20, 2024. Without a federal budget in place by then (unlikely based on the way the House and Senate have managed prior versions of this budget crisis), there will either be another continuing resolution or a government shutdown.
In the words of AmericanProgress.org, “If Congress fails to send a budget to the president by February 2, 2024, 1.3 million active-duty members will go without pay, even as they continue to protect Americans.”
This is an ongoing story.
About the author
Editor-in-Chief Joe Wallace is a 13-year veteran of the United States Air Force and a former reporter/editor for Air Force Television News and the Pentagon Channel. His freelance work includes contract work for Motorola, VALoans.com, and Credit Karma. He is co-founder of Dim Art House in Springfield, Illinois, and spends his non-writing time as an abstract painter, independent publisher, and occasional filmmaker.
