House-Senate negotiators neared agreement Sunday on the last pieces of a $1.1 trillion spending bill designed to avert any shutdown this week and put most government agencies on firm footing through next September.

Building on a long weekend of talks, the goal was to file the giant measure by late Monday and then push for quick floor action before the current funding runs out Thursday night.


Details were closely held given the tense political climate. But the formula for the compromise was direct: Freeze domestic appropriations at home and direct the most dollars and punch to counter new threats from overseas.

Almost all the big initiatives begin at the water’s edge: containing Ebola in West Africa, fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the Mideast, shoring up Europe against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, helping Central America counter the violence and poverty that sent thousands of children across the Rio Grande into Texas last spring.

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By comparison, President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda — like Alice’s Red Queen — will have to run hard just to stay in place.

Even the president’s popular TIGER transportation grants are reduced to $500 million, $100 million below 2014 and less than half of what Obama wanted in 2015. The National Institutes of Health will benefit from new Ebola funds for clinical trials, but its core $29.8 billion budget is expected to grow by just $150 million — not enough to keep pace with inflation.

Indeed, from Amtrak to Head Start and low-income fuel assistance, much of the domestic budget is flat.

Modest increases are allowed to hire more immigration judges and make good on promises to beef up child care grants. Funding for Pell Grants is preserved and new steps begun to address the problem of college affordability. But Republicans resisted repeated efforts by retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to allow some cap adjustment for NIH. And despite support from Obama and Western Republicans, it remained a hard sell to allow emergency, off-budget spending for catastrophic wildfires.

Caught in the middle of this zero-sum game are two favorite Republican targets: the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency.

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The bill provides an estimated $10.9 billion for the IRS and $8.1 billion for the EPA — real cuts from current funding, especially for the IRS. At one level, it can be argued that the bill takes money from Peter to pay Paul for a string of Republican priorities, such as $50 million in drought response funding in the Bureau of Reclamation and a $100 million increase in the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund.

This type of competition was baked into the cake a year ago when Congress and the administration agreed to revised spending caps for fiscal 2014 and 2015.

That pact allowed Obama to recover in 2014 from deep cuts made by sequestration in 2013. But the second increase for nondefense spending in 2015 was so small that it was immediately overcome by prior commitments to veterans’ medical care and a drop in federal receipts that had previously helped offset the cost of housing programs.

Nonetheless, at this stage in Obama’s presidency, the emphasis on security-related programs over investments at home is still striking. And all signs indicate the pattern will repeat itself in 2016.

Friday’s strong jobs report testified to how far the nation has come since the Great Recession, which greeted Obama when he first moved into the White House in 2009. But despite the improved economy, Obama will leave office with fewer real dollars for domestic appropriations than President George W. Bush had before him.

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Veterans’ medical care — which has ballooned with two wars and the aging Vietnam veteran population — is the big exception. But the clear message for Obama is one of retrenchment as he seeks to prep the battlefield before Republicans take full control of Congress next month.

In fact, well over $600 billion or better than half the spending in the bill would come under either the Defense or State departments.

In the Pentagon’s case, its core budget will be $490.2 billion, supplemented by about $64 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations funds counted outside the budget caps. This is more than Obama first anticipated last spring and reflects the stepped-up U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria as well as $175 million to aid Ukraine and Baltic states like Latvia in the face of Putin’s aggressive posture.

Another $49.2 billion is designated for the State Department and foreign aid accounts, including almost $9 billion in OCO funds. The extra OCO funds will help preserve what’s become a greatly expanded refugee assistance program of just over $3 billion annually. Almost $1.9 billion is provided in disaster assistance — again heavily dependent on OCO support.

Closer to home, the bill provides about $260 million for a basket of programs to help Central America address some of the economic and social ills that drove the spike in child migrants this past year. But after all the tough talk of standing up to Egypt on human rights, the agreement backs away from cutting Cairo’s $1.3 billion in military aid and instead makes a small but surprising cut in economic assistance.

The funding to address Ebola — adjusted upward Sunday to $5.4 billion — will be treated as emergency appropriations, separate from OCO. The total could yet change again before filing Monday, but on balance Obama is assured of most of the $6.2 billion he requested — and without substantial contingencies.

Pentagon researchers would receive about $112 million, but the bulk is distributed through the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services. USAID’s portion is expected to be about $2.5 billion. HHS is likely to get closer to $2.7 billion, money that will go largely to NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But some portion is expected to also compensate medical centers in Georgia and Nebraska that treated some of early cases of Americans infected by the deadly virus.

The final mop-up negotiations over the weekend had less to do with dollars than policy riders challenging Obama’s regulatory powers.

Republicans are furious with the president for having used his executive authority to pre-empt them on immigration reform. And in a bit of tit-for-tat, the GOP is eager to flex its new muscle over the power of the purse.

Despite angry protests from the Transportation Department, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and the trucking industry were expected to win changes related to new rules governing the rest required for drivers. Child nutrition standards backed by first lady Michelle Obama were in play, though the House agreed to back away from some of its earlier demands.

And despite a pivotal 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Friday, the business lobby was still pursuing changes Sunday related to how the Labor Department calculates what “prevailing wage” should apply for low-income guest workers under the H-2B visa program.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), the respective chairs of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees, made significant progress in face-to-face talks Friday. But several outlying issues remained Sunday that could require sign-offs from top party leaders in both chambers.

To appease the right, the Department of Homeland Security will be kept on a short leash so Republicans can revisit the issue of Obama’s executive order on immigration. But all other Cabinet departments stand to greatly benefit from the chance to update accounts. And as the bill gains momentum, efforts are underway to use it as the engine to pull other year-end legislation, such as an extension of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, a priority for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If successful, the package would very much be a personal triumph for Mikulski and Rogers after the two lawmakers passed a similar omnibus measure a year ago.

But the level of secrecy they imposed for this round has been exceptional and could yet hurt the Appropriations Committee leadership as it tries to reestablish itself.

Backroom bargaining is nothing new for Appropriations, but there has also been a long tradition of tempering this secrecy by offering informal guidance as the decisions are made. This has been more absent now, with veteran clerks fearful of talking about even noncontroversial parts of their bills.

The leadership would argue that the secrecy is justified given the political tensions in Congress. But the picture is of a committee so scared of outside disruptions that it’s forgotten the pride it once took as a public panel making public decisions about public money.

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