Republicans are raising concerns about what Trump-backed strategies are concerned about, which could mean the threat of government shutdown next week for defense programs over the next six months.
This week, President Trump touted a clean six-month continuous resolution (CR) to help Republicans “have effectively freeze this year” for government programs, while also allowing Republicans to focus more on moving forward on their tax agenda. However, some Republicans have warned about what “freeze” means to the military this weekend, as lawmakers will be in charge of releasing texts.
“I don't like it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of Cardinal's Expenses, told Hill Thursday. “I think we're out of place or need supplements.”
House top GOP fundraisers say there is an add-on known as anomaly in order to defend the law. Among the proposals Republicans are debating are the funds for changes to allow already approved wages for military personnel who have already been approved, as well as more spending flexibility.
“The only anomaly we're doing is basically anomaly from the administration,” House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told reporters this week. However, he said some of the changes were intended to give the administration the ability to “address issues like defense.”
But he also said Republicans would not “add extra money” and lawmakers would “stay within the limits we have.”
“I have some friends. They're my friends in the Senate and I want to put in millions of dollars of extra dollars. We can't do that,” he said.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the former GOP conference president and chair of the subcommittee that oversees annual defense funds, wrote that the “real clean” halts set at the 2024 level on Tuesday in the Washington Post will become a “disaster recipe.”
“The true clean, year-round continuous resolution at the 201024 level means a fresh start in critical programs that the military needs to adapt to the rapidly changing battlefield, such as directed energy drones and missile defenses,” he wrote.
McConnell, who opposed Trump's Pete Hegses nomination to lead the Department of Defense, called “the Pentagon's senior civil leader” “the need to raise the top line of defense budgets, or the impending self-inflict and lethal harm to looming, looming harm and fatality, failing to lose their first break.
For those who oppose CR, certain fears lie in the lack of launching a new program called Starts. This means that there will be fewer new features in the hands of fighters a few years from now.
They argue that it will force the United States to fall behind the enemy. They argue that they cannot respond quickly to evolving threats, unexpected events and new technological opportunities.
That problem was laid out in a Almost 400 pages of report to CongressIt was released in March 2024. The committee recommended that the Defense Planning and Budget Reform Committee be allowed to allow a new start program in certain cases where the Pentagon operates under the CR.
“The CRS generally includes provisions banning new start activities, which slows down efforts to insert innovative technology into both new and current programs,” the report states.
Such a carve-out is valuable amidst China's increasingly malicious activity in the Indo-Pacific region, putting Taiwan under its control and threatening it to be involved in territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Recently, Chinese warships have orbited Australian coastlines for over three weeks, hosting wargames near New Zealand, and have undergone two unprecedented developments that rattle US allies.
Beijing's military spending remains the second largest behind Washington state, but the world's largest navy is the air force, slightly behind the US forces, in the midst of the largest military accumulation since World War II, with a focus on advances in nuclear weapons systems in particular.
If the Pentagon is forced to increase its 2024 funding levels throughout the rest of the year, that means “there is no money or approval for the 168 new programs, much of which is needed to compete for China in space and cyberspace,” says McConnell.
“The cost of deterring war compared to the costs of war. If Congress doesn't want to invest in deterrent today, the debate on the looming threat, particularly the urgency of China's “pacing threat,” has little weight,” he argued.
Lawmakers had to pass two ongoing resolutions to lift the government in 2025.
But lawmakers on both sides say the defense program's suspension by the end of the fiscal year is unprecedented. There are also concerns that the expanded suspension will give the Trump administration more discretion on fundraising.
“It's so big and complicated that we never had a year-round CR for the Department of Defense,” a top Democrat (Dell), who serves alongside McConnell on the Defense Subcommittee, told Hill Thursday.
“There are so many moving works that actually properly handing over the core responsibility of Congress to give the President the scope to freely reprogram billions of dollars requires that, given what happened in this first month, demands that I have a huge amount of discretion that I consider,” he added.
Senate Approval Speaker Susan Collins (R. Maine) was pressed by a reporter on Thursday about whether she was defending what she is currently being made to allow for a fresh start.
“A new start is very important, but it should be a new start where either the House or Senate has approved it in the bill,” Collins said. “What I don't want is a huge amount of money that the department head determines what a new start is without approval from Congress.”
But she also warned that if the upcoming plan doesn't allow a new start, lawmakers will risk “submarine production, destroyer contracts, contracts of all sorts of contracts will not be signed and will hurt important programs.”
House Republicans are expected to take swift action in their suspension plan next week as lawmakers stare at the March 14th closure deadline. However, Cole and other GOP negotiators show openness to both parties continuing their debate to reach bipartisan funding agreements for the 2025 individual funding bill.
“The best thing now is to ensure that the government will fund it all the way through September 30th,” Cole said. “There is no possibility of a disruption, but the speakers want to continue negotiating. We still think the deal is better than CR. But we're going to identify CR.”
But Democrats have come out strongly against the Republican halt plan, but instead aim to push for a short-term funding patch, with both sides aiming to free up the updated funding bill for the remaining fiscal year. That means GOP leadership could face challenges in pushing for next week's suspension plan, along with a Republican razor-like majority.
But as some Republicans are increasing the need for anomalies for their defense programs, others say they are keeping an eye on potential price tags as well.
“I told the president about it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said Thursday after saying he hadn't said he was “on boarding” the plan yet. “I have a few questions. Will it really be clean? Will the budget add a bunch of Pentagon fixes?”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said this week that he supports CR supplements and supports defense programs, but stressed the importance of government funding being frozen at the current level.
“As long as the overall spending levels are flattened, we are happy to be able to defend some of these anomalies again,” he told Hill on Tuesday.
