Normally, The Topline takes the week off when Congress is out-of-town. But there has been a pair of important developments over the past week that warrant a special edition of the newsletter to keep you informed.
Supplemental Soars: After months of back-and-forth as to whether Congress would pass supplemental aid for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region, the House and Senate passed an aid package put forward by Speaker Mike Johnson, which was signed into law on Wednesday. At times, the chances of this package even coming to the floor appeared slim, but as we mentioned as few weeks ago, FY24 going out the door gave Congress the bandwidth to strategize about how to get this aid package onto President Biden's desk.
The package provides $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel, and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific region. It also includes a wide range of policy items, most notably a provision forcing TikTok to divest within a year of enactment or face a ban from the U.S. market.
On Your (Ear)Mark, Get Set, Go: For those of you eyeing FY25 projects, we note that both House and Senate Appropriations Committees have released their guidance for submitting programmatic and earmark requests. In the House, deadlines for both programmatic requests and Community Project Funding requests are next week, with programmatic requests due by Wednesday May 1 and Community Project Funding requests due by Friday May 3. The guidance is available here. In the Senate, general guidance, including deadlines for submitting requests to the various subcommittees, is available here, with the first subcommittee deadline on May 8 and the last deadline on May 15. This quick turnaround is in part due to the FY24 delay, and is also aligned with the cardinals' goal of holding markups in May.
One notable change in the House guidance is that non-profit organizations are no longer eligible to receive Community Project Funding through the Housing and Urban Development's Economic Development Initiative following Republican objections regarding which organizations received these funds in FY24. The ban on earmarks for the Financial Services and Labor-HHS funding bills will remain in place.
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