At a White House ceremony yesterday, Kirstjen Nielsen was introduced by President Trump as his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The previous secretary, John Kelly, is now the White House Chief of Staff. Elaine Duke is currently serving as the Acting Secretary of DHS.
Nielsen is currently the principal deputy chief of staff under Kelly and worked for him as well when he ran DHS.
Read more about the nomination here and here.
The Senate Budget Committee will take its first steps on a framework for federal spending and tax cuts in FY 2018 this week.
The Senate Budget Committee released its FY 2018 draft resolution on Friday that would establish the path for consideration of revenue, spending, and other fiscal legislation.
Senate Committee will debate overall limits on discretionary spending for the coming fiscal year and 10-year projections, as well as mark up the resolution on Wednesday and Thursday. If adopted, it could become an enforcement tool — through points of order — during the annual appropriations process. House and Senate majority were attempting to use the FY 2018 budget as a means to further repeal the ACA — the House included language to instruct committees to do so — but all language instructing the Senate Committees to do similar has been stripped. Rather, the Senate focuses on tax reform, signaling a pivot in the Majority’s priorities.
The focal point of the legislation is the draft language instructing the Senate Finance and the House Ways and Means committees to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. That number gives the tax-writing panels the opportunity to alter the tax code.
The whole Senate will begin its annual Budget consideration process, known as “vote-a-rama,” the week of October 16th.
Meanwhile, the full House plans to vote Thursday on its own budget resolution, which also would advance what would be the most sweeping tax overhaul in more than three decades. That plan would require Congress to cut at least $203 billion from entitlement programs over 10 years. House leadership has suggested the Senate version is more likely to prevail in a final compromise and the language on entitlements is likely to be stripped on the House floor.
There are other notable differences between the House and Senate budgets. For instance, the House budget includes instructions for a tax plan that does not increase the deficit, but the Senate budget would let tax writers add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade. The Senate provides $549 billion for defense spending and $516 billion for nondefense discretionary programs, which are levels in line the the Budget Control Act caps. The House measure provides $621.5 billion for defense programs and $511 billion for nondefense discretionary programs. Since the House provides levels significantly beyond the BCA caps, enacting such a measure would take an act of legislation (and a signature by the President), which is beyond the scope of a typical Congressional budget, a document that only binds Congress and is not signed by the President.
Eventually, the two chambers would have to agree on a budget for Congressional Republicans to use reconciliation.
Federal FY2017 comes to a close Saturday night, September 30. To prevent the government from shutting down Sunday morning at the start of FY2018, Congress passed and the President signed into law earlier this month a short-term funding measure that would keep the federal government funded through the first week of December essentially at FY2017 levels.
Whether and if any of the 12 individual spending bills for FY2018 are dealt with before the short-term funding package expires on December 9 remains to be seen.
After dinner last night between President Trump and the two top Congressional Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), a number of reports have emerged about whether the three agreed to a deal around a host of immigration issues, including those around how to protect individuals impacted by the repeal of DACA. While the Democratic leaders have stated that an agreement had been reached, the White House and Congressional Republican have pushed back against those assertions. Like other issues that must be dealt by the federal government, the situation on this front also remains fluid.