• A Record-Setting Congress?

    Manish Naik

    Director of Legislative Services

    At the end of March, Congress finally finished the last of their appropriations bills for FY 2024, finalizing funding for the upcoming 2024-25 school year almost six months into the federal fiscal year. Although appropriators were constrained by spending caps agreed to last year as part of the debt ceiling bill, the major K-12 programs were essentially kept level for next school year. This includes Title I and IDEA Part B, the two biggest federal K-12 programs, as well as essential ESEA programs in Title II, Title III, and Title IV.

    Although a new federal fiscal year starts less than five months from now, Congress is expected to follow recent precedent and wait until after the November elections and maybe until next year to finalize FY 2025 appropriations. Even with spending caps still in place to determine overall funding levels in FY 2025, both parties prefer to wait and see if election results will strengthen their hand in the negotiations to determine final funding decisions.

    Congress also recently agreed on aid to Ukraine and the Middle East and passed a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Debate and action on the Farm Bill and Federal Aviation Administration reauthorizations are also ongoing, but there is very little must-pass legislation remaining in the 118th Congress.

    There has been some action and activity related to children’s online privacy, with a bipartisan Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) being considered in both the House and Senate. But Congress will pivot to almost full-time campaigning very soon, with multiple weeks of the summer in recess when members are back home and at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. This light congressional summer schedule will be followed by an early fall adjournment with all of October spent on election campaigns.

    It is not unusual for action to slow in election years, but it’s worth noting that in 2023, the first year of the current 118th Congress, only 34 bills were passed into law. According to records, that total marked the lowest number of bills passed in the first year of a congressional session since the Great Depression. There were certainly reasons for congressional paralysis in 2023, including multi-month posturing over the debt ceiling and a multi-week search for a new Speaker of the House, not to mention slim majorities and opposing control in each chamber that makes it hard to pass legislation.

    But with a rapidly dwindling number of legislative days before the November elections, it’s very possible that the second year of the 118th Congress could be even less productive than the first, in which case the total number of bills enacted during the two-year term of the 118th Congress might set a new record low that future legislative sessions can benchmark against.