Rules Committee to Meet on FY 2018 Spending Bill

The House Rules Committee will meet later today on HR 3354, the vehicle for a combined FY 2018 spending bill. There have been a couple of changes to the proposed spending bill since I originally wrote about it last month; HR 3219 (the previously House passed DOD/VA/Energy/Legislative spending bill) has been added into the bill making this a true omnibus bill; and the recision of $875 million unspent Disaster Relief Funds has been removed for fairly obvious reasons.

As I suggested in that earlier post, a large number of amendments have been proposed for this bill;

• 174 for the Interior/EPA Division;

• 50 for the Agriculture/FDA Division;

• 145 for the Commerce/Science/Justice Division;

• 150 for the Financial Services Division;

• 119 for the Homeland Security Division;

• 184 for the Labor/HHS Division;

• 89 for the State/Foreign Operations Division; and

• 89 for the Transportation/Housing and Urban Development Division

There is no way that even I am going to try to review all of those proposed amendments (unfortunately the staff of the Rules Committee does not have that option), but a quick review of the 119 DHS amendments shows that many are duplicative (or contradictory) politically motivated amendments and surprisingly there are no cybersecurity amendments included in the list.

I do expect that the meeting tonight will formulate a rule with a limited (but relatively large) number of amendments that will be authorized to be submitted from the floor later this week. The amendments will not make or break this bill, however. It will be the number of conservative talking point provisions in the bill. If the number is not high enough, the Leadership will lose enough Republican votes that they may not be able to pass the bill. Conversely, if the number is too high there will not be enough support from Democrats to counter the defecting Republicans. The Republican leadership has an interesting tightrope to walk with this bill. The problem is further magnified in the Senate because the Republican ‘control’ of that body is illusory at best. And, of course, a Presidential signature is still not a foregone conclusion this year.