CNN
By Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby, CNN
(CNN) — The Senate accredited a slimmed-down, short-term authorities spending plan early Saturday morning, averting a shutdown of the federal authorities. The laws now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature.
The passage of the package deal got here after President-elect Donald Trump torpedoed a bipartisan settlement struck earlier within the week. A Home vote on a Trump-endorsed funding invoice failed on Thursday night, however the chamber then accredited a revised invoice Friday night.
The laws funds the federal government by way of March 14, establishing one other spending showdown within the early days of the Trump administration. Republicans will management each the Senate and Home come January, however the celebration may have slim margins in each chambers.
The package deal additionally retains billions of {dollars} in catastrophe aid sorely wanted by states hit laborious earlier this yr by two main hurricanes.
Right here’s what else is within the invoice:
Extra catastrophe assist funding
The spending invoice offers about $100 billion to assist Individuals attempting to get better from a number of pure disasters in 2023 and 2024. The funding is consistent with the roughly $100 billion topline request from the Biden administration in November.
Some $29 billion will assist replenish the Federal Emergency Administration Company’s Catastrophe Reduction Fund, which has dwindled after contending with two main hurricanes that ripped by way of the Southeast earlier this yr, in addition to different disasters.
In October, FEMA quickly spent $9 billion of a $20 billion infusion from Congress responding to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The company additionally needed to deal with wildfires, floods and tornados this yr. Federal knowledge reveals the pricey disasters are actually occurring extra regularly.
Financial assist for farmers
The invoice consists of $10 billion in financial assist for farmers, one of many final sticking factors in negotiations earlier this week. Lawmakers from agriculture-focused states have argued that the assistance is desperately wanted because the US’s farmers are dealing with decrease commodity costs and better prices for provides.
The spending settlement additionally features a one-year extension of the farm invoice – a sweeping package deal that governs many agricultural and diet help applications. Usually, the invoice is renewed each 5 years, however the newest model was handed in 2018 and the extension lapsed on the finish of September. The persevering with decision extends it for a yr.
Maryland bridge funding
Below the the invoice, changing the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland will probably be absolutely funded by the federal authorities. The laws will even permit the US Treasury Division to recoup cash from any settlements associated to the bridge’s collapse to assist pay for the rebuilding.
A cargo ship crashed into the bridge in March, inflicting it to break down and severing entry to essential delivery routes out and in of the Port of Baltimore. Six employees on the bridge have been killed.
Rebuilding the bridge might price between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion, in keeping with an estimate launched by the Maryland Transportation Authority earlier this yr.
Extending telehealth flexibilities in Medicare
The funding settlement additionally features a three-month extension of a pandemic-era measure that expanded using telehealth in Medicare.
Extra senior residents and Individuals with disabilities have been in a position to get care by way of telehealth because the Covid-19 pandemic started in early 2020. Eligibility for the service was broadened past simply these residing in rural areas, and seniors have been in a position to conduct the telehealth go to at dwelling, relatively than having to journey to a well being care facility.
Right here’s what’s not within the funding package deal:
Debt ceiling extension
The GOP package deal that failed Thursday would have suspended the debt ceiling till January 30, 2027, addressing Trump’s key demand from his Wednesday evisceration of the unique deal. As an alternative, Republicans are together with a rise of the debt ceiling in a future package deal subsequent yr.
The debt ceiling is at present set to return on January 2. It was suspended as a part of the bipartisan Fiscal Duty Act, which Congress handed in June 2023. Lawmakers doubtless would have till mid-2025 to handle the debt ceiling because the Treasury Division might quickly use money readily available and different measures to maintain paying the nation’s bills and keep away from a first-ever default.
Though Republicans will management Capitol Hill and the White Home subsequent yr, having to take care of the debt ceiling then would add one other sophisticated situation onto the celebration’s already-full plate, which incorporates extending the sweeping 2017 Trump tax cuts.
The 2023 deal took months to craft and introduced the nation uncomfortably near a default, which might have unleashed international financial chaos and had main penalties on many Individuals’ funds.
Established by Congress, the debt ceiling is the utmost quantity the federal authorities can borrow to finance obligations that lawmakers and presidents have already accredited. Treasury must borrow to pay the bills because the US spends greater than it collects in income, leading to a price range deficit.
The nation’s debt at present stands at $36.2 trillion.
Reforms for pharmacy profit managers
After two years of failed makes an attempt, lawmakers appeared near together with a slate of reforms for pharmacy profit managers, the controversial middlemen between drug producers and insurers who’ve raised the ire of Congress and lots of others with their opaque practices, within the authorities funding package deal. However the measures didn’t make the lower.
The now-dead funding deal would have required PBMs to offer extra data on the rebates they negotiate and retain, in addition to what they pay for medicine and the way a lot they compensate pharmacies. It might have eliminated the connection between the value of medication and the compensation the PBMs obtain in Medicare Half D drug plans and shifted the fee mannequin to flat charges.
Plus, the settlement would have required the business to go alongside all rebates to the well being plan sponsors, which embrace insurers and employers, within the industrial insurance coverage market. It might even have successfully eradicated so-called “spread pricing,” through which the PBMs withhold a part of the fee they obtain for medicine from pharmacies, in Medicaid.
The trouble aimed to extend transparency and alter the business’s compensation construction, mentioned Ross Margulies, accomplice at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a legislation agency specializing in well being care. The priority has been that PBMs might have the inducement to desire higher-cost medicine since they’ll negotiate bigger rebates on them.
The Federal Commerce Fee in September sued the biggest PBMs – CVS Well being’s Caremark Rx, Cigna’s Specific Scripts and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx – for allegedly inflating insulin costs.
PBMs argued that the laws would weaken their capacity to decrease drug prices and will end in larger premiums for senior residents.
Management over RFK stadium
A deal to offer Washington, DC better management over the RFK stadium gave the impression to be misplaced when it was not noted of the invoice handed by the Home on Friday — however in an early morning shock, the Senate unanimously handed a invoice giving DC management over the land across the stadium.
HR 4984, the DC Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium Campus Revitalization Act, beforehand handed the Home 348-55 in February. If signed into legislation by President Joe Biden, the measure will switch the land across the stadium from the federal authorities to DC — paving the best way for the stadium to be redeveloped, and for the NFL’s Washington Commanders to return to the placement after spending the final 27 years in Landover, Maryland.
Pay raises for lawmakers
The invoice that Trump torpedoed would have supplied lawmakers with their first pay elevate since 2009.
Each Republican and Democrat leaders had agreed to incorporate the language, which might have allowed members to obtain an automated cost-of-living adjustment to their base salaries of $174,000 per yr, in keeping with a number of folks acquainted with the discussions.
This is able to have been a change to present observe, through which Congress takes steps in every spending invoice to take away that cost-of-living adjustment. That has been in place because the 2009 recession.
The settlement additionally would have allowed members of Congress to opt-out of Reasonably priced Care Act well being protection — a requirement that infuriated some GOP lawmakers — and would have allow them to enroll within the Federal Workers Well being Advantages Program.
Limiting investments in China
Additionally stripped from the invoice was a provision that will have restricted US investments in China, significantly within the expertise sector.
Democrats have slammed the elimination of the measure, arguing that its absence would profit Elon Musk, who helped derail the bipartisan package deal on Wednesday.
“Musk’s investments in China, and ties with its government, have only grown over the last few years – alongside his growing involvement in American politics,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, rating member of the Home Appropriations Committee, wrote in a letter Friday to congressional leaders.
“It is no surprise, then, that ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law,” she wrote.
The measure would have “prevented wealthy investors from continuing to offshore production and US intellectual property into China,” she wrote.
Criminalizing revenge porn
A bipartisan invoice that criminalizes the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), typically known as revenge porn – together with deepfakes, had been connected to the unique spending package deal. It might even have required social media and different web sites to have procedures in place to take down a picture inside 48 hours of a legitimate request from a sufferer.
At the moment, many states have legal guidelines addressing the publication of NCII, however this regulation, which was launched earlier this yr because the Take it Down Act, would have created the primary federal legislation.
Lawmakers and tech firms have been dealing with strain to do extra to fight revenge porn as synthetic intelligence has made it simpler to create and unfold the content material.
Funding for pediatric most cancers analysis
The ultimate invoice doesn’t reauthorize federal funding for the Nationwide Institutes of Well being’s Gabriella Miller Children First Pediatric Analysis Program. However the Senate on Friday night time handed the measure as a standalone invoice, which authorizes $12.5 million per yr for 5 years. The laws, which was accredited by the Home in March and now goes to Biden for his signature, will fund this system into 2028.
The initiative helps lifesaving analysis of therapies and cures for childhood most cancers for the final 9 years, in keeping with Rep. Jennifer Wexton and Sen. Tim Kaine, each Democrats from Virginia. The bipartisan invoice would have supplied funding for seven years.
Miller, a Virginia resident with an inoperable mind tumor, died in 2013 on the age of 10. The next yr, former President Barack Obama signed into legislation the Gabriella Miller Children First Analysis Act, which licensed $12.6 million in annual funds for childhood illness analysis by way of fiscal yr 2023.
Reimbursing meals stamp theft
The bipartisan invoice would have continued protections for low-income Individuals who had their meals stamp advantages stolen, usually by way of skimming gadgets that get recipients’ Digital Advantages Switch (EBT) card data.
Congress allowed states to exchange the stolen advantages on a restricted foundation utilizing federal funds, as a part of a authorities funding invoice two years in the past. Up to now, states have changed greater than $150 million in advantages stolen from greater than 300,000 low-income SNAP households throughout the nation, in keeping with the Heart on Funds and Coverage Priorities, citing US Division of Agriculture knowledge.
This story has been up to date with further particulars.
CNN’s Sarah Ferris, Lauren Fox, Clare Foran, Manu Raju and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.
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