Boehner: Vote on CR Will Wait Till September

House Speaker John Boehner said today that a House vote on a Continuing Resolution (CR) for the first part of FY2015 would wait until September rather than trying to do it before the House leaves for its August recess.

The House leaves at the end of next week and will return on September 8 and meet for only 10 days that month.  The current fiscal year ends on September 30.

Speaking at his weekly briefing with reporters today, Boehner said the CR likely would be voted on in September and last until early December, after the mid-term elections.

CRs usually hold agencies to their previous year’s spending levels.  NASA received $17.646 million for FY2014.  President Obama’s FY2015 request was $186 million less than that, but the House-passed and Senate-committee-approved Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bills would provide a substantial increase over that request — a total of about $17.9 billion.

Optimism that the Senate might pass the CJS and two other appropriations bills, combined together into a “minibus” bill, faded last month because of partisan politics dealing with the amendment process.   The Senate has not passed any FY2015 appropriations bills yet.  The House has passed seven of the 12 regular appropriations bills including CJS (which funds NASA and NOAA), Defense, and Transportation-HUD (which funds the FAA and its Office of Commercial Space Transportation).