What’s In the GOP House Budget Bill Passed on March 11, 2025. This provides a stopgap bill that funds the federal government through September 30, 2025. It still has to be passed by the Senate to avert a partial shutdown on March 14. The major issue is the latitude it has given Trump/Musk to make spending cuts. And, tariffs continue to present a major inflationary impact on the average American. Congress needs to have input on spending cuts and tariffs.
- The bill does NOT cover the majority of government spending including social security and medicare.
- Increase defense spending by $6 billion (didn’t Elon ask for $50 billion in cuts a week ago??)
- Decrease Non-defense spending by $13 billion
- If not funded, 900,000 federal workers could be furloughed without pay and more than 1.4 million work without pay
- Funds veteran’s health care services and benefits (didn’t they want to fire 80,000 employees from VA a week ago???) Source
- Funds federal wildland firefighters
- Increase funding for air traffic control systems by $753 million
- WIC- funding for nutrition assistance to mothers, infants and children would jump fro more than $500 million to $7.6 Billion- (think Melanie at work on her husband)- a request made by Trump administration. Yeah!
- Increase funding for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program which supports low income seniors
- Funding for the Food Safety and Inspection Service to review meat and poultry processing plants (think bird flu)
- Neuters lawmakers powers to force a vote on whether to terminate the president’s ability to impose tariffs.That would help Republican members avoid a politically painful up-or-down vote on ending Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
- Spending cuts of $185 million for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation programs
- Spending cut of $1.4 billion for the Army Corp of Engineers construction funding used for projects to mitigate the impact of hurricanes and floods.
Note- Social Security and Medicare and not affected by a partial shutdown..but may not be a great time to travel- air, etc.