The legislation includes significant Ukraine aid and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Both the House and Senate have finally passed full-year appropriations bills, unlocking billions in aid to Ukraine, infrastructure money, and millions in earmarks.
The $1.5 trillion appropriations package now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk, where he’s expected to sign it. The massive, 12-bill omnibus is the product of months of negotiating between the two parties, as well as a last-minute scramble to remove Covid-19 relief due to concerns some Democrats had about how it would be paid for.
It will provide $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and greenlight new levels of social spending and defense spending after they’ve been locked at Trump-era levels for over a year.
Lawmakers also still have to deal with keeping the government open: Both the House and Senate voted to extend a March 11 funding deadline until next Tuesday, giving themselves more time to navigate procedural hurdles.
The $1.5 trillion appropriations bill contains a 6.7 percent increase in non-defense spending over the previous fiscal year to $730 billion, and a 5.6 percent increase in defense spending to $782 billion. Below are some of the programs that it will fund:
In the Senate, these earmarks are now called “congressionally directed spending” and included requests for community centers, fire stations, and airport terminals. In the House, they are called “community project funding,” and included requests for regional water projects, local school programs, and workforce training. There are more than 4,000 earmarks in the omnibus package, The Hill reports.
Democrats have announced that they plan to hold a standalone vote on Covid-19 funding next week, but it’s unclear how much Republican support it will be able to garner as a separate bill.
Democrats had decided to drop Covid-19 funding from the omnibus package because their own members disagreed with how it would be paid for. Since Republicans wanted new Covid-19 funds to be offset, lawmakers had agreed to do so by using $8 billion in unspent funding from the American Rescue Plan, which had yet to be sent to different states. Democratic lawmakers from those states, however, fiercely opposed this arrangement — leading it to be removed from the final omnibus.
The decision to strip this funding carries risk. If it’s not ultimately approved, it could severely impede the United States’s response to a new variant, its ability to seek out additional treatments, and its resources for distributing vaccines internationally.
“It is heartbreaking to remove the COVID funding, and we must continue to fight for urgently needed COVID assistance, but unfortunately that will not be included in this bill,” Pelosi wrote in a letter on Wednesday.
Author: Li Zhou
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