WASHINGTON—With just three days to go before the politically split and ideologically fractured current Congress ends its two-year dysfunctional run, lawmakers readied themselves to vote, possibly as early as today but no later than December 20, on a stopgap spending bill to extend most current money levels through March.
The good news is, if they approve it, the government’s lights stay on, checks go out, planes keep flying, vets keep getting medical care and other services—from food inspections to Labor Department job safety enforcement–keep going. And there’ll be more aid funneled to hurricane victims, too.
The bad news is that by punting tough decisions and votes into the next, totally Republican-run Congress, plus the incoming GOP Trump regime, some of the nastier anti-worker measures already envisioned–see below–can then come to fruition, unless workers can recruit enough allies to put pressure on to stop them.
Meanwhile, in both the temporary money bill and next year’s “permanent” one, a trillion dollars would still flow to the Pentagon’s war machine, and its contractors.
Key provisions of the 1500-page temporary money bill include:
- A one-year extension of federal subsidies to farmers and ranchers. The annual farm bill, which OKs such aid, also includes money for the food stamp program, but it was unclear if that’s in the temporary bill, too. And most traditional farm aid goes to agribusiness, not family farmers.
- A crackdown, which both political parties support, on pharmacy benefit managers, one of the top cost drivers in the ever-more expensive U.S. health care non-system.
The PBMs, featuring reams of bean counters who know little if anything about medicine and its effectiveness, arbitrarily rule which drugs are in and which are out of your insurer’s coverage. The difference to consumers can be hundreds of dollars per prescription or more. The PBMs, largely unregulated, favor steering patients to higher-cost drugs, because PBMs get higher commissions.
- Renewing federal research and drug distribution to control future pandemics, despite screams from the right about “government interference” mandating vaccinations against the coronavirus.
- Keeping Medicare and Medicaid physician payments at current levels, not cutting them. The bill is silent, though on insurers’ setting pay.
- About $110 billion more in emergency and disaster funding to help victims of floods, hurricanes and wildfires. The funds “will help Americans rebuild and recover” from disasters, said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the top House Appropriations Committee Democrat.
But the bill doesn’t have any “offsets,” grabbing money from elsewhere to pay for disaster aid. That may trigger a revolt by the “Freedom Caucus,” Trumpite Republicans whose tail wags the party’s dog.
- Federal funds to rebuild the Francis Scott Key bridge over the entrance to Baltimore harbor. The bridge is a key link for north-south truck trade and car traffic on the East Coast. The money is supposed to be recouped, eventually, from the owners and operators of the container cargo ship that crashed into the bridge’s central pier earlier this year, sending the entire span into the muddy water, and killing six workers.
Sponsoring Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., didn’t mention payments to the families of the workers, all of them migrants from Central America. The International Longshoremen’s Association stepped in after the bridge crashed into the bay last March to aid the families.
- Funding for at least the next three years for health care and benefits for Fire Fighters, Operating Engineers, Laborers and others who combed through the toxic ruins of al-Qaeda’s destruction of the World Trade Center more than two decades ago, and/or their survivors.
“This solves our current projected deficit that would have forced cuts to program services in as little as three years and harmed 9/11 responders and survivors. This new formula, which will begin in 2026, provides substantially more funding and peace of mind,” said Sen, Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
- A rewrite of federal adult workforce development programs to make them stronger and more effective. The “Stronger Workforce for America Act ensures workers will benefit from innovative workforce development programs and be able to access to good-paying jobs,” said lead sponsor Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.
The measure will devote half of all adult workforce development dollars to “upskilling workers through ‘individual training accounts,’ on-the-job learning, and wrap-around supports, while redirecting an existing funding stream toward ITAs for displaced workers” a bill summary says. Employers, though, will pick the jobs workers can be trained for.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters he sought “a very simple, very clean” stopgap funding bill “to get us into next year when we have a unified government.”
But that “unified government” of all-Republican control could spell bad news for workers, a close reading of key regular House-crafted money bills—all from Republicans—shows. That’s because their provisions, which would not take effect until next March, if then, include:
- A $74.5 million cut, to $557 million overall, for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Of that, all $12.8 million for training grants would go. The rest represents a $61 million cut in enforcement money, to $182 million. Less funding equals less enforcement, little as it is now.
- Less job safety and health research too, if the GOP has its way in March. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health would lose $100 million, declining to $200 million.
- A $99 million cut, to $200 million, for the National Labor Relations Board, which is already understaffed. That cut would take the NLRB back, in current dollars, not counting inflation, to its funding of 12 years ago. The Republicans also criticize board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, though not by name, for memos and board rulings the GOP says hamper corporate communications with workers, among other issues.
- A complete cutoff of all family planning money for Planned Parenthood, including pre-natal care, because Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions.
- An order to all teleworking feds to return fulltime to their desks by the middle of next year, overriding union contracts which provide more leeway and studies which show hybrid part-telework, part-office jobs are more productive.
Republicans scream about lazy federal work from home. The leaders of Trump’s cut-the-government commission, millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and billionaire Elon Musk, openly root for tens of thousands of feds to quit. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a pro-business Democrat, wants her downtown full of workers again.
- The House Appropriations bill which covers federal workers—and which wouldn’t take effect before April, if it passed and Trump signed it, has a zero percent pay raise. It also has language to let Trump start to fire 50,000 top civil servants, turning what he calls “the deep state” into a spoils system like that of the Gilded Age.
“The sort of broadsides against federal employee telework paint a picture of federal employees as people who are committing fraud against the American people, and collecting paychecks without performing the duties of their jobs, which is simply not true,” Jacqueline Simon, public policy director of the Government Employees (AFGE), told Portside Labor.
- “For the second year in a row, the majority’s bill prophesies the complete destruction of public education,” Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro wrote. This year’s cuts—which again wouldn’t hit before March—“decimate support for K–12 education—including cuts that would take at least 72,000 teachers out of low-income classrooms—and abandons college students and lower-income workers trying to gain an education.”
- Huge cuts, of up to two-thirds, in funds for building mass transit systems, buying buses and renovating Amtrak trains and stations.
- Cutting “the sole program dedicated to constructing new affordable workforce housing by 60% despite a 12% increase in homelessness nationally.”
- That prospective money bill would also kill legal aid and tenant protections against evictions. It even ends funding to eliminate lead-based paint in public housing. And it reduces anti-discrimination enforcement in public housing, too.
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