House Passes Second FY24 Package, Arming Our Servicemembers and Supporting Our Great Ally Israel

WASHINGTON - Today, the House of Representatives met to consider H.R. 2882, The Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024. The measure was approved with a vote of 286 to 134.

In recent years, domestic spending has skyrocketed, adding trillions to our national debt. For the 118th Congress, the House Republican Conference made a promise to change the trajectory of federal spending and put an end to budgetary waste, without shortchanging investments in national security.

Now, House Republicans are delivering on that promise. Under Speaker Johnson’s topline spending agreement, the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations bills dramatically reduce the use of off-book resources and budgetary gimmicks – steps that will save taxpayers more than $200 billion over the next ten years. The bills are more than $100 billion below the President’s Budget Request and rein in the Senate’s efforts to spend beyond the topline agreement. The bills represent the first overall cut to non-defense, non-VA spending in almost a decade.

Fundamentally, the bills achieve what House Republicans set out to do by strategically increasing defense spending, rescinding wasteful Democrat spending, and making targeted cuts to overfunded non-defense programs.

The bills in this package are prime examples:

• The Defense Appropriations Act provides robust funding to arm our servicemembers with the tools they need to protect our nation.
  • The Act also rejects tens of billions of dollars in waste included in the President’s Budget Request and redirects those resources to activities that counter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and other near-peer adversaries.
• The State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act reinforces our commitment to prioritize America's interests by slashing the Act’s overall spending by 6% and holding organizations like the United Nations accountable for blatant bias against our allies.
  • The Act also continues our commitment to Israel, fully funding our annual security commitment of $3.3 billion, prohibiting any taxpayer funding from going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and eliminating funding for the United Nations Commission of Inquiry against Israel.
• $20.2 billion is pulled back from the Administration, partially defunding President Biden’s supercharged army of 85,000 IRS agents who are set on targeting everyday Americans.

Spending reductions aren’t the only Republican wins in these bills. Even with a Democrat as President, a divided Congress, and a slim Majority, House Republicans maintained longstanding legacy riders that Democrats sought to repeal, rejected harmful policies proposed in the President’s Budget and Senate bills, and fought for and secured conservative wins.

A full summary of the package is available here.

Bill text is available here.

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