The House on Thursday passed seven FY2022 appropriations bills by a 219 to 208 vote. The bills, bundled into a “minibus,” include funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Other departments funded in the package, known as H.R. 4502, include the Departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. The bill also included funding for the federal judiciary, Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Small Business Administration (SBA), Social Security Administration, Executive Office of the President, military construction activities conducted by the Department of Defense, and other independent agencies.
The FY2022 Agriculture Appropriations bill includes discretionary funding of $26.55 billion, an increase of $2.851 billion above FY2021 enacted levels. Including mandatory spending for programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the bill totals $196.7 billion.
The bill includes $1.153 billion for the Food Safety and Inspection Service, an increase from $1.05 billion for FY2021.
Text, summaries and fact sheets for each individual bill can be found here. The agriculture appropriations bill text can be found here and summary here. House floor amendment votes can be found here.
In total, the bill includes $617 billion in discretionary spending, a 16 percent funding increase to non-defense agencies that largely mirrors the White House budget requests.
The White House released a Statement of Administration Policy upon the passage of the minibus, which made remarks about the bill relative to the President’s budget for 2022. “Over the past decade, due in large measure to overly restrictive budget caps, the Nation significantly underinvested in core priorities such as education, research, and public health that are vital to our prosperity and strength,” the statement said. “We have seen the consequences of this broad disinvestment in our lack of preparedness to effectively respond to a global pandemic. We have seen it in global competitors that are catching up or even surpassing the United States in research and development. … These cuts to public investment in basic services and protections have cost us all – and the moment to begin reversing this troubling trend is now.”
In total, the minibus includes seven of the 12 annual appropriations bills to fund the federal government for the new fiscal year beginning October 1, 2021. For reference, the House had passed all of its appropriations bills before the August recess in 2021. The Senate has not passed one bill through a committee or the floor.
In addition to appropriations bills, Congress must also address the debt ceiling, which at its current level is set to expire on July 31, 2021. Congress and the White House in 2019 agreed to a two-year debt ceiling of $22 trillion, but an additional $6.5 trillion has been borrowed since that time. That puts the total U.S. debt subject to the ceiling at $28.58 trillion. In FY2021, the U.S. is running a roughly $3.1 trillion budget deficit. There is discussion in Congress regarding the passage of a potential $550 billion physical infrastructure spending bill, a $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill focused on social programs, as well as annual appropriations totaling near $1.5 trillion just this fiscal year.
The Treasury Department has stated in May that it would use “extraordinary measures” to avoid defaulting over the summer. With COVID-19 uncertainty regarding Congressional action that could affect Treasury cash flows, such as pandemic-related tax credits, fiscal spending and monetary easing, the exact date at which the Treasury Department could no longer meet its debt obligations is not known.
