For federal agencies, the current sequester-related budget crunch is unprecedented. Congress, however, isn’t letting go of one venerable tradition: Paying a year’s congressional salary (currently at a base level of $174,000) as a death benefit to the spouse of a lawmaker who dies in office. No across-the-board cut here: The fiscal 2014 continuing resolution unveiled yesterday authorizes the full payment to Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg, widow of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. Frank Lautenberg died in June at age 89. After rising from childhood poverty to lead the Automatic Data Processing payroll management company, Lautenberg was numbered among the Senate’s…
Browsing: continuing resolution
Even though the U.S. Postal Service isn’t mentioned once in the stop-gap spending bill approved by the House this afternoon, the measure deals a blow to the agency’s hope of ending Saturday mail delivery this August. For about 30 years, Congress has used annual appropriations bills to continue a ban on any reduction in mail delivery frequency. But continuing resolutions like the one that cleared the House today are basically just extensions of whatever Congress did the previous year. And because this particular CR is ‘silent” on the mail delivery issue, that means the prohibition would remain in force through…
The continuing spending resolutions continue . . . To give itself a little breathing room, Congress has approved a three-day extension of the continuing resolution, or CR, that would have expired at midnight tonight. The extension, approved Friday, pushed the deadline back to Tuesday. Before that point, lawmakers are expected to pass one more CR that would run into early next year. The resolutions generally leave agency spending frozen at fiscal 2010 levels; the latest round comes after Senate Democrats could not round up the votes to break a likely Republican filibuster of a catch-all appropriations bill for fiscal 2011. …
Happy Friday! On a voice vote Thursday evening, the Senate passed a continuing spending resolution to keep the government in business through Dec. 18. The House had approved the resolution Wednesday. It will extend a similar measure that was set to expire Friday at midnight, so no government shutdown for at least another two weeks. Like its predecessor, this new resolution basically keeps spending at fiscal 2010 levels. Since Congress is not likely to finish up work on a dozen fiscal 2011 appropriations bills in the week before Christmas, there will probably be at least one more continuing resolution to push…