WASHINGTON — With government funding set to run out this weekend, congressional leaders neared agreement Wednesday on a voluminous spending bill that would top $1 trillion, beef up domestic and military programs, and fund the government through September.
“We’re feeling very good about this,’’ Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said after a meeting of top congressional leaders at the Capitol, which buzzed with activity even as the falling snow shuttered much of Washington.
The House and Senate have until midnight Friday to pass the spending bill to avoid what would be the third government shutdown of the year. As part of the spending talks, congressional leaders have been trying to resolve disputes over such issues as immigration, a southern border wall, health care, and a planned rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey that has drawn the ire of President Trump.
Some details emerged Wednesday as negotiators tried to resolve the last issues standing in their way. To improve border security, the coming deal will include more than $1 billion for physical barriers along the border with Mexico as well as related technology, congressional aides said.
But there will be strings attached to what can be built, and the funding is far short of the total Trump would ultimately need to build his promised “big, beautiful wall.’’
The coming agreement is not expected to resolve the uncertain fate of hundreds of thousands of young unauthorized immigrants who have been protected under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which Trump has moved to end.
An effort by some lawmakers to attach to the spending bill a proposal to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act also appears very likely to fail, at least in part because of a dispute over abortion.
Another sticking point in recent days was funding for a series of infrastructure projects in the New York City area known as the Gateway program, including a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Despite his New York roots, Trump zeroed in on the Gateway program and urged Republican leaders not to provide federal funds for it — an apparent rebuke to Schumer, whose caucus the president has repeatedly accused of obstructionism.
The spending bill will not include $900 million in funding for Gateway that had been included in House legislation last year. But according to a senior congressional aide, it will include hundreds of millions of dollars that could go toward the Gateway program, including funds that do not require the approval of Trump’s Department of Transportation.
The legislation is also expected to include hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to states for election technology and in extra funds for the FBI to combat Russian cyberattacks.
And although Congress has shown little appetite for passing significant gun control legislation in response to the mass shooting last month in Parkland, Florida, the spending bill will include a modest measure to improve reporting to the national background check system for gun purchases, according to a senior Republican aide.
Congress approved a broad two-year budget deal last month that paved the way for this week’s legislation. That deal set overall spending levels, raising strict limits on military and domestic spending by a total of about $140 billion this year. This week’s spending bill allocates the allowed spending among a vast array of federal programs.
The mammoth bill is long overdue, coming more than five months after the 2018 fiscal year began on Oct. 1. Since then, Congress has needed five stopgap spending measures to keep the government open. By snapping that streak of short-term patches, lawmakers would provide a dose of stability to federal agencies that have been left in limbo as Congress lurched from one stopgap measure to the next.
Even if a final deal is reached, there would still be some risk of a brief shutdown this weekend, as any one senator could stop the Senate from speeding up consideration of the spending bill to meet Friday’s deadline. Last month, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, did just that, causing an hourslong shutdown as he bemoaned the government’s mounting debt.
This time around, with lawmakers expected to vote on a gigantic spending bill with little time to digest its contents, Paul is unhappy yet again.
“It’s a rotten, terrible, no-good way to run your government,’’ he said on Tuesday, adding, “Really, should we be looking in thousand-page bills with 24 hours to decide what’s in them?’’
The approval of the spending bill would be another blow to those worried about the government’s ballooning debt.
The spending spree follows Republicans’ sweeping tax overhaul late last year, which was projected to add $1.5 trillion to federal budget deficits over a decade. The deficit is now expected to exceed $1 trillion in the 2019 fiscal year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
