Ranking Member DeLauro Statement to House Rules Committee on Three-Month Continuing Resolution

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) delivered the following remarks at the House Rules Committee hearing on the three-month Continuing Resolution:

Chairman Burgess, Ranking Member McGovern, and distinguished members of the committee, this continuing resolution will avert a costly and pointless government shutdown and will provide Congress with the time required to enact bipartisan full year funding bills for 2025.

We require a continuing resolution to keep the government open because House Republicans chose to write extreme and partisan funding bills based on Donald Trump’s Project 2025 manifesto, seven of which the House did not even consider because the majority knew they would not pass on the floor. Project 2025 is enormously unpopular with the American people, as are the deep cuts to vital public investments that House Republicans tried to force on the American people throughout this year.

The majority did not learn a single lesson from the chaos Congress was dragged through to complete the funding process for fiscal year 2024.

Until this bill, House Republicans had so far refused to meet Democrats at the negotiating table, despite the fact that appropriations bills cannot become law without the support of Republicans and Democrats in the House and in the Senate. That includes House Republicans’ first ill-conceived continuing resolution, which thankfully was rejected by the House of Representatives last week, as we all knew it would.

In this bill, I am relieved that House Republicans excluded partisan poison pill riders like the SAVE Act and abandoned the disastrous across-the-board cuts that they have proposed in the past. It is never ideal to govern with a continuing resolution, but this bill is a responsible and sober measure that avoids many of the problems that House Republicans would have created with a six-month funding bill.

However, this bill leaves a number of holes that Congress must address by December in conjunction with completing all 12 full year appropriations bills.

As has been reaffirmed multiple times through the 118th Congress by Leader Schumer and Speakers McCarthy and Johnson, the terms of the Fiscal Responsibility Act set our topline spending level at one percent above where we ended up in March. Democrats will accept nothing less than one percent. Any increases in defense must see dollar for dollar parity for nondefense. We know where we have to end up, and it is my hope that this bill will provide the bipartisan momentum needed to get there.

The House should pass this Continuing Resolution.

Thank you.

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