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Six Months Late, Congress Finalizes 2024 Federal Budget [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2024-03-27
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
Congress approved the second and final package of spending bills for the 2024 federal budget last weekend, marking the end to a tumultuous six months of congressional bickering and stopgap bills to prevent government shutdown after last year’s budget expired on October 1, 2023.
The first spending package was approved earlier in March and allocates $460 billion to departments like Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.
Vital programs like the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program will receive $7 billion from the package, up $1 billion from the amount allocated last year. If this spending package had not been passed and no stopgap bill enacted, funding to nutrition programs like WIC and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – key programs in rural America – would have been paused.
The second spending package that was approved over the weekend will allocate most of its $1.2 trillion to defense and homeland security operations: $824 billion will be given to the Department of Defense that will fund increased military pay and housing allowances, as well as continue business-as-usual operations.
Nearly $62 billion will be given to the Department of Homeland Security amid growing conflict at the Texas-Mexico border where a newly passed Texas immigration law allows local and state law enforcement agencies to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the border. A federal court is currently considering the legality of the law, which the Biden administration argues is unconstitutional because historically only the federal government has been able to enforce immigration law.
The homeland security money will fund more Border Patrol agents, bringing their numbers to a record-high 22,000, and fund an additional 150 officers for counter-fentanyl efforts. The money will not go to border wall construction.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is operated under the Department of Homeland Security, will be given about $25 billion, which is $73 million dollars less than its 2023 allocation. FEMA provides disaster relief and mitigation funding to rural and urban communities across the country.
This second slate of spending bills provides some foreign aid, with $300 million directed to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative to support Ukraine through Russia’s continued attack on the country.
In contrast, a provision in the package prohibits that U.S. aid be sent to Palestinian refugees through UNRWA, the United Nations-led relief agency supporting Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, among other places. Funding to UNRWA is prohibited through 2025. The Gaza Strip has been the target of ongoing bombardment from Israel since an October 7 attack by the Palestinian group Hamas.
The U.S. will continue to give its annual security commitment of $3.3 billion to Israel to fund missile defense.
The long awaited budget and the six months of continued debate after its September 2023 deadline is an example of the extremely divided Congress, and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said what passed last weekend “represents the best achievable outcome in a divided government,” according to reporting from the Associated Press.
Now, Congress can look forward to doing it all again in just a few short months: the 2024 federal budget expires September 30.
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