US Congressional leaders are reportedly in talks over a spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown by the midnight March 1 deadline. Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman explains the known details of these negotiations and the outlook on lawmakers avoiding a total government shutdown by next week.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: Well, congressional leaders say they have a plan to avert a government shutdown at least for now. The short-term bill funds the government until March 8 and March 22. To break this all down for us, Yahoo Finance's very own Rick Newman is here. We're back to a short-term funding bill, Rick.
RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, we should point out we are five months into the government's fiscal year. Republicans said one of the things they were going to make a hallmark of their control of the House of Representatives this year was we were going to get back to regular spending bills. In other words, you pass a spending bill for the whole year at the start of the fiscal year, October 1, and then you don't have to go through all of this nonsense. But of course, that hasn't happened.
So the short answer to what's happening now is Congress has not yet passed the permanent spending bills, but there's reporting that the leaders in the House and the Senate have come up with some kind of agreement. What they're going to do is another short term spending bill, but apparently they do have enough agreement on the basic priorities that during that time, the next few weeks going into March, they will actually get the full spending bills done. And if this reporting is all true and nothing blows up, then I guess by the end of March that means the government will be funded all the way through the end of September.
And then after September, I guess we just start up with this whole thing all over again. But basic takeaway here is that the odds of a government shutdown are rapidly declining. They're not zero because something could always go wrong here, but it looks like the government is just going to stay in operation.
