Budget battle over -- for now

Congress on Monday evening averted a government shutdown after reaching a last-minute agreement on a spending bill, which includes new funding for disaster relief expenses.

The final deal was struck after Democrats and Republicans came to a compromise over funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which Republicans wanted to offset with spending cuts. In the end, Democrats agreed to give the cash-strapped FEMA less money than they wanted to, and Republicans agreed to scrap the cuts they wanted to pass in order to pay for the FEMA expenses.

The FEMA funding is part of a larger federal budget bill that keeps the government running through Nov. 18. The Senate passed the bill Monday night, and House leaders plan to pass the funding in part on Thursday -- one day before the end of the fiscal year. Had the bill failed to pass by Friday, the government would have shut down.

On the face of it, lawmakers on Capitol Hill just barely escaped a government shut down because of a partisan fight over a mere .04 percent of the federal budget -- a minor squabble over FEMA funding that both sides ultimately wanted to pass.

On the Senate floor Monday night, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called the skirmish a "fire drill [that] was completely unnecessary."

The tussle over a few billion in funding, however, signifies that both Democrats and Republicans saw this as something of a principled fight in the broader struggle over deficits and government spending. And the passage of this latest spending bill only delays the larger fight by a couple of months.

When the new funding measure expires on Nov. 18, Congress will have to figure out the rest of the 2012 federal budget. As part of the debt ceiling deal Congress passed in August, lawmakers already agreed to a $1.043 trillion budget for 2012. It's unclear, though, how that money will be allocated, and the two parties clearly have different ideas of how to spend government funds.

House Republicans made it clear in this particular budget fight that they're willing to go to great lengths to avoid extra spending -- even for something as popular as disaster relief funding. This bill was initially held up because Democrats wanted to give FEMA $1 billion in immediate funding to carry it through the rest of this week. But that would've added to the 2011 fiscal budget (which, again, ends Sept. 30), so Republicans insisted it needed to be offset with spending cuts.

Democrats argued the GOP-proposed cuts to green technology programs would have cost the U.S. thousands of jobs. Furthermore, Democrats said they weren't just fighting for green technology funding -- they argued they were fighting to stave off a dangerous precedent in government spending. Emergency funding for disaster relief shouldn't be contingent on offsets, they argued.

Ultimately, FEMA said it could scrape by on its current budget until next week, so Congress just scrapped the extra $1 billion in question. While this week's budgetary disaster was averted, the escalated debate doesn't bode well for the progress of the rest of 2012 budget.

The current funding measure's expiration date -- Nov. 18 -- is enough in and of itself to ensure some serious budget debate this winter. But on top of that, the 2012 budget debate will be gearing up just as other heavy-duty budget debates will be taking place in Washington.