The House on Wednesday passed a $1.5 trillion budget package to fund the federal government through the end of September, The Hill reported.
The omnibus package would provide more than $780 billion for the Department of Defense and other defense initiatives and increase the Department of Homeland Security’s funding by 11 percent.
House lawmakers also approved by voice vote a continuing resolution that would run through March 15 to provide the Senate enough time to pass the omnibus bill and avoid a government shutdown. The current stopgap measure is set to expire Friday, March 11.
The package would allocate approximately $14 billion in emergency funds to support humanitarian, economic and security assistance to Ukraine and allies in central Europe amid the Russian invasion.
Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller, said DOD may require additional funding on top of current plans for fiscal year 2022 or FY 2023 if Lloyd Austin, secretary of DOD and a 2022 Wash100 Award recipient, orders further deployment of U.S. forces to back NATO allies in eastern Europe in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a report by Breaking Defense.
“The funding that we requested …. was for the deployments the secretary has ordered to date,” said McCord, a previous Wash100 awardee.
“So if the secretary orders more deployments or extends deployments, our costs will start to go up above what we projected. Now they don’t go up a lot, and obviously we have some other tools to deal with that by reprogramming. [But] if they go up a lot, and then we will probably come back [and ask for more money]," he added.
