Administration Officials Head to the Hill to Make FY24 Budget Case
With most Member deadlines for constituent requests for the FY24 appropriations cycle coming to a close this week and next, Members and staff must now sort through the hundreds if not thousands of requests and recommendations received and decide which to put forward to the Committee and Subcommittee by those deadlines over the course of the next few weeks. While that internal process is taking place, Administration officials are headed to Capitol Hill to appear in front of both authorizing and appropriations committees to justify their FY24 budget requests. Among them, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra appeared this week. Your WSW team will be reporting out to you directly on hearings impacting your key areas of interests. All of these activities come in advance of the mark-up of FY24 appropriations bills which we expect could begin as early as this spring or early summer in both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.
Here’s what else you may have missed this week:
President Biden issues first veto. President Biden issued the first veto of his presidency this week to protect an administrative initiative promoting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies for retirement fund managers. Republicans oppose ESG practices, claiming such practices can be contrary to the interests of investors. Their attempt to override the president’s veto failed in the House on Thursday.
Recent bank failures add pressure to debt limit negotiations. The Congressional agenda is only getting more challenging with recent bank failures adding to significant economic uncertainties and making the stakes around raising the nation’s debt ceiling even higher. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates again this week in continued attempts to drive down inflation while expressing confidence that the U.S. banking system was sound. House Leader McCarthy continues to call for major concessions on reducing overall levels of federal spending while President Biden continues to call for early action on a clean measure to raise the debt limit and to do so sooner rather than later to add certainty to an otherwise uncertain landscape. This standoff shows no signs of abating in the near-term. In the weeks to come, the Biden Administration is expected to hit the road to continue to highlight major economic investments resulting from the work of the last two years including the Infrastructure Act and the CHIPS Act.
High profile Congressional hearings continue. The parade of CEOs before Congress continued this week with TikTok’s CEO facing bipartisan fire over the social media company’s Chinese ownership and invasive presence in the private lives of Americans and the security threat posed by the Chinese Communist party’s access to the company. Both Executive Branch and Legislative action restricting and even barring access to TikTok in the U.S. is anticipated. Next week, recently retired Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will face Senate HELP Chairman Bernie Sanders over what Sanders views as the company’s anti-union practices.
