Interview transcript

Terry Gerton There’s so many headlines coming out of Congress, I can’t even keep track, but let’s get to funding. Rumor has it that the NDAA is going to get a vote soon. What are you hearing?

Loren Duggan That’s what we’re hearing as well. This has been a target to do something by the end of the year. Both chambers passed versions and sent them to informal talks where they’re trying to come up with a compromise and the big four, the chairman and ranking members of the committees have been sitting down and hashing that out. We first need to see texts. They’ll come up an agreement and post this text. We’ll be pouring over it and seeing what it says. And they had hoped for votes in early December, once they all get back to town after Thanksgiving and get that through and onto President Trump, because it is a big bill every year. They always do it. No one wants to fail at doing it. And so we’re likely to see a compromise and some votes in December on that.

Terry Gerton Any surprising additions over the last few weeks?

Loren Duggan Well, I think the big thing that’s been introduced to the debate has been whether or not to preempt state AI regulation using language in this bill. That was something that had come up in the summer around the reconciliation or the one big, beautiful bill act where they had inserted it in the house, took it out in the Senate and it’s come back as an issue and would talk around maybe a draft executive order on AI policy or some sort of legislative language to address that. So that’s, been one of the things that’s come up. And you know, the bill like that always attracts everything from contracting policy to defense questions to war and peace and things like that. So, you know I think the compromise that comes out will have broad support among the folks who need to vote on it. So that might mean some things drop out of the conversation, but … until we see that language, we won’t know what makes the cut.

Terry Gerton Well, it’s good to hear that it’s moving forward on that end of the year timeline. Let’s move to appropriations bills. When we got the shutdown settlement, we got a small minibus of bills with full-year appropriations. But now they’re talking about some other combinations. What are you hearing and what’s the progress before January 30th?

Loren Duggan Right, so the continuing resolution that reopened the government had three of the bills for agriculture and FDA, legislative branch, and military construction and VA. So those are all set, but there’s still nine to go. And one of the questions is, how do you package them? What do you do? And which chambers vote on things next? So what we have been anticipating is a package in the Senate that would be the Senate bills, not necessarily a compromise, but at least to move the ball forward, package together four or five bills. I think the keys to that would be defense and then the labor HHS education bills, which are kind of like your guns and butter combination, plus some other bills that have come out of the appropriations committee. Likewise, the appropriators, the top ones in the House and the Senate sat down and tried to find their own path forward. You know, what talks can we have? Do we want to wait for the Senate? So there’s been some talk and some activity, but the January 30th deadline gives them a little bit of wiggle room. They may try to get something done. Before the end of the year, but obviously they don’t have to do another thing until January 30th.

Terry Gerton Let’s talk about that first bundle you mentioned, Defense, Labor, H[ousing], and Education. The Trump administration has been announcing its dismemberment of the Education Department, not its disestablishment, but its dismemberment. If they pass an appropriations bill that treats the department like it always was, how do you put Humpty Dumpty back together again in those circumstances?

Loren Duggan I mean, this sort of goes back to the executive action on a lot of different things where Congress had asked — I mean let’s go back to the beginning of this year where USAID was a fully funded agency and was slowly phased out and some of its responsibilities diffused elsewhere. So, you know, the education department, as you mentioned, they took some steps last week, announced some, you know, spidering out of its duties across the government as they’d like to see. Congress would probably have to pass a bill to completely disestablish the department, but we’ll see what they say in these bills. I mean, they’ve written, to my knowledge, the education portion of that Labor-HHS-Education bill is as though the department was what it was when they approved that bill. So, you know, Congress may push back on a complete dismemberment of the department, but that’s part of the kind of ongoing dynamic here that we’ve seen all year.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Loren Duggan, he’s deputy news director at Bloomberg Government. Loren, a couple other things I want to take up with you. One, discharge petitions seem to be having a moment in the house. Talk to us about why that is happening and what it means in terms of regular order.

Loren Duggan So discharge petitions matter most when there’s a really narrow majority. And you know, there’s the majority party and the majority of a day. And the majority of a day means you get 218 to sign onto one of these petitions and you can pull forward legislation, even if leaders don’t want. And to your point, we’ve seen that a couple of times this year. We saw it on proxy voting for parents. We saw it on most recently — we saw it on the Epstein case, obviously, which was one that had dragged out for a while. And then Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat, got it on a labor-related bill, and he attracted enough Republican support. And that’s what it means here. There are a lot of Democrats, but you need at least a few Republicans. They cross over. You can control the floor or at least push your bill forward. Historically, this existed because the speaker had an iron grip on the House agenda and members banded together and created this process. There is some talk now, some pushback. Do we need to change this process, make it harder? And we’ll see if there’s any traction for that, but as long as the majority is as narrow as it is, and you get enough members to band with you, you can kind of control the agenda for a brief period of time.

Terry Gerton Well, it does at least seem to be moving some things forward.

Loren Duggan It definitely is moving things around. I mean, the Epstein vote had been wanted by people for a long time and then they finally got it. And what was even more interesting there is you went from like a bare majority signing onto the discharge petition to all but one of those who voted voting yes in the end. So, you know, the dynamics there are really interesting.

Terry Gerton So there’s one more topic that I want to take up with you, and it bundles several recent headlines together. We had a federal judge who ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia was illegal. We had some members of both houses of Congress create a video talking about why the military doesn’t need to obey illegal orders, and a response from the White House on that. And then we’ve got Ukraine and Venezuelan operations that continue to circulate. I don’t want to dig into any of those specifically, but collectively, Congress has a responsibility here when it comes to military operations and deployment. Do all of these things perhaps portend a more active engagement from either the Senate or the House on these issues of military operations?

Loren Duggan I mean, we’ve seen some of that, obviously there’s pushback a lot of times from Democrats on what this administration is doing, but there is Republican pushback as well. We’ve seen that on some of the foreign policy questions, whether it’s terrorists or, attacking Venezuela, preventing an attack on land in Venezuela, dealing with the boats. So Congress is asserting itself in some places, but, you know, controlling the hearings right now, that’s all Republicans. And if they want to avoid a hearing that would perhaps raise some of these questions. But at the same time, if you get a a nominee for a defense job in front of some senators, they may ask some tough questions and likewise in the house. So I think we’ll see some discussions, some pushback on some of these things. The defense debate that we’ve talked about having both on the spending side and the authorization side, there could be discussion around all those topics in there as well. So, you know, we see Congress asserting itself in different ways and outside of Congress too, using social media channels, using the media to get their message across or try to push back on what they don’t like.

Terry Gerton So what are you anticipating will be at the top of the agenda when Congress gets back after the Thanksgiving holiday?

Loren Duggan One thing that’s going to surge back is this ACA enhanced premium tax credit issue, how to prevent increases in what people are paying for their health insurance under Obamacare. Going into the recess, there was no consensus. They’re going to try to push for it. Senators agree to vote by the end of the year on something. We’ll be looking to see what that something ends up being. But that’s really driving a lot of the discussion on and off the floor right now.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Loren Duggan, deputy news director at Bloomberg Government. Loren, thanks as always. Thank you. We’ll post this interview at federalnewsnetwork.com slash federal drive. Here at the federal drive on your schedule, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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