The threat of a government shutdown — and the missed paychecks it would mean for service members — is growing after a chaotic week in the House that saw lawmakers unable to even take up a bill that would fund the Pentagon.
The House had been scheduled to vote this week on the fiscal 2024 defense appropriations bill. But members of the far-right Freedom Caucus and other staunch conservatives threatened to oppose a procedural motion on the bill because of demands unrelated to its content, prompting House Republican leadership to scuttle the planned vote.
Republicans are expected to try again next week to bring the defense spending bill to the floor. But it's unclear whether the outcome will be any different than this week, and the episode underscored the difficulty lawmakers face in finding a path to keep the government open at the end of the fiscal year in 16 days.
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“I'm worried about it,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said Thursday about the prospect of a government shutdown. “People don't realize, that haven't been here since the 2013 shutdown, that the troops don't get paid. And that may be convenient for them. But if you're sitting in Niger in a trailer or in Poland or Romania or whatever, and you're not getting paid, it's not OK.”
In 2013, when the government shut down…
