[UPDATE: Dec. 20, 2024, 630pm] Instead of approving the giant budget bill for the fiscal year, the House voted on Friday for a temporary measure to extend current funding to March and approve disaster relief. The Senate is expected to confirm the vote tonight.
[Original Story] The Central Coast stands to lose as much as $14 million in public projects if the standoff in Washington over the government funding bill isn’t resolved before midnight on Friday. The scramble of late-night discussions is business as usual for the deeply divided Congress, with Republicans taking their cues from a president who has yet to be inaugurated into office — and who some say is taking advice from the richest man in the world — and Democrats, about to be outnumbered after January 20, holding their ground.
Santa Barbara’s man in Congress, Salud Carbajal, pointed out that the country is already a quarter of the way through the fiscal year, arguing that “extremism” was causing delays. “Republican leadership in Congress has spent months prioritizing culture war poison pills over governing, refusing to work across the aisle to reach a funding deal for this year. These needless delays have real impacts on the Central Coast,” he stated in a press release. The poison pills Carbajal refers to are riders added to the budget bills that emanate from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s manifesto to make America conservative again.
Carpinteria awaits $850,000 toward its community center from the spending bill, and $2 million is to go toward Santa Barbara Unified School District’s new resource center. New fire stations in Santa Maria and Santa Margarita are slated to be funded by $2.45 million in the bill, as is $1 million toward Guadalupe’s new senior center.
The threat of a shutdown would affect government employee paychecks and any activities deemed “nonessential,” such as civilians in the military, national parks, tax audits, and civil proceedings in federal courts.
After negotiations resulting in bipartisan proposals, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) is wrangling his fellow Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump. As one set of discussions ended, Trump, advised by Elon Musk, contacted Johnson on Wednesday to say the bill was “extraordinarily expensive,” media reports state, although the alternative offered, while of significantly fewer pages, carried an equivalent price tag of around $6.2 trillion.
Another three-month stopgap to continue current spending is currently under discussion, according to the New York Times, while members of Johnson’s own party are unable to agree whether or not to increase the debt limit ceiling, which could be a preview of things to come.
