They want to avoid a nightmare before Christmas.
Congressional leaders dropped the text late Tuesday for legislation to stave off a looming government shutdown Friday night and keep the government’s lights on through March 14, 2025, at current spending levels.
In keeping with Congress’ Christmas tradition of a late December scramble, the 1,547-page continuing resolution was chock-full of an assortment of add-ons affecting everything from pharmaceutical policy to $100 billion in disaster relief.
The measure also featured tightened restrictions on US investments in China, the green light for the NFL’s Washington Commanders to return to the RFK Stadium site, provisions aimed at the middlemen in drug pricing, a one-year extension of the farm bill, a reauthorization of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems program and more.
Leadership has not yet laid out a clear plan for when the CR will be taken up for a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has waffled as to whether he will adhere to the soft 72-hour rule intended to give lawmakers time to parse through the text.
Should Johnson stick with the 72-hour rule, then the Senate will be forced to move quickly on Friday in order to prevent a shutdown.
A cacophony of Republican lawmakers groaned about the CR, griping over everything from the process to some of the add-ons — including moderate members and the hard-right flank alike.
“Everything I am hearing about the CR thus far leads me to believe that I’ll be voting NO. Republicans are in the majority and yet the Democrats seem to get more of their priorities in than we do,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) complained on X before the text was released.
“This CR is turning into a three-month omnibus, that will result in more Democrats than Republicans voting for it. The Swamp is using farmers and victims of natural disasters as pawns to fund an over-bloated pet project filled disaster,” Rep. Marjorie Taylore Greene (R-Ga.) griped.
She later struck a more ominous tone, “The Christmas CR lump of coal comes with a warning. Beware the Ides of March.”
Should the CR go into effect, it will tee up a nasty spending fight near the end of President-elect Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office.
Congress is tasked with funding the government via 12 appropriation bills each new fiscal year — which starts on Oct. 1. It still has yet to do so, which is why it leans on stopgap measures to punt the fight into the future.
Next year, Congress will be forced to address the fiscal year 2025 budget, fiscal year 2026 budget, the debt ceiling, expiring Trump tax cuts and more.
But the disaster aid portions of the spending patch lift an expensive item off the agenda for next year. The disaster aid comes alongside funds to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland that collapsed earlier this year after a cargo ship rammed into it and $10 billion in aid to farmers.
Hardliner Republicans fumed over both the process and the apparent lack of offsets in the mammoth bill.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), for instance, demanded that Johnson adhere to the 72-hour rule, allow a vote on a pay-for and vote on legislation to stop the selling off of border wall materials.
“The Swamp is going to Swamp. This is not the way to do business. We’re just fundamentally unserious about spending. As long as you’ve got a blank check, you can’t shrink government. If you can’t shrink government, you can’t live free,” Roy told reporters.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) similarly decried the stopgap.
“What do RFK Stadium, $50 billion for Big Pharma, and two new Smithsonian museums do for Americans devastated by the hurricanes?” he wrote on X.
Attack on the Pharma middlemen
Private industry groused over the CR’s attack on the pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs), the middle-men who negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies and help manage formularies.
PBMs have long drawn bipartisan scrutiny over concerns that they can cause higher list prices on drugs and siphon money from consumers.
Essentially, critics believe that PBMs want pharmaceutical companies to push higher list prices on drugs so that consumers will go through them — as the middlemen — in order to get lower net prices because PBMs negotiate rebates from Big Pharma. From there, the PBMs are believed to rake in money from that process via fees. PBMs deny those characterizations of their activities.
The CR imposes a ban on any tying of PBM compensation to the list price of a drug and strictly compels PBMs to “fully pass through 100 percent of drug rebates and discounts … to the employer or health plan.”
The stopgap also entails language aimed at increasing transparency when it comes to PBMs so that they are more upfront about the details and fees negotiated with pharmaceutical companies.
PBMs have lashed out at some of these measures, arguing that they will weaken them and give pharmaceutical companies a stronger hand at the negotiating table to raise prices.
Katie Payne, senior vice president of Public Affairs and Head of Advocacy for The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association raged against the measure saying “Congress is choosing pharma over patients, employers, and seniors.”
“If the precedent-setting Big Pharma giveaway spending bill passes, big drug companies will get billions in windfall profits,” Payne argued in a statement. “The bill also represents a massive government intrusion into commercial market contracting. No longer will employers have the final say on their contracts with PBMs.”
Johnson is reckoning with slim control of the lower chamber, which could briefly slip into a one-seat majority early next year.
At the start of next month, he will vie for the speaker’s gavel in the new Congress, something that proved to be troublesome for his predecessor, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
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