House Appropriators Begin Work on FY2021 Spending Bills

The House Appropriations Committee began work on their FY2021 spending bills last week. The committee will complete action on all 12 spending bills this week. Next week, they will package four of these bills – Agriculture, Interior-Environment, Military Construction-Veterans Affairs, and State-Foreign Operations – and consider them on the House floor. The week of July 27, they will take up another package of FY21 spending bills, but didn’t announce which bills would be included in that package. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) wrote in a Dear Colleague, “the House will have passed legislation to fund 96% of the government before the end of July for the second time in two years.” Most think that this means they will hold back the FY21 Homeland Security Appropriations bill from House floor consideration as it is 3.9% of the total FY21 discretionary budget.

Senate Appropriators have not released nor marked up any of their FY21 bills. Senate Republicans are concerned that Democrats will offer amendments on coronavirus aid (they think that should be considered separately) or on reforming police (they think that should be a separate policy bill, not a spending bill).

As they were marking up their FY21 bills, House Appropriators set the overall funding levels – called 302(b)s – for each subcommittee. Here’s how the House funding levels compare with the enacted levels for FY20.

The end of the fiscal year is September 30. Congress likely will have to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government past September 30. A CR basically funds the government at the prior year’s funding levels and doesn’t allow for any new starts.

I went through some of the House FY21 spending bills and pulled funding levels and language for programs I thought would be of interest to FOSA members.