Congress releases the text of government spending package

Lawmakers on Thursday began analyzing provisions of the 1,012-page, spending bill. It is the second part of a two-part spending bill package. 

What’s included in the bill? The bill provides funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State, as well as “foreign operations.”

What does that look like, practically? The bill covers several notable topics.

• Southern border: It provides roughly $18 billion in aid for Customs and Border Protection for, among other uses, purchasing “police-type vehicles,” drones, aircraft, and boats. And it provides roughly $9.5 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, ICE’s funds can’t be used for detention programs deemed “less than ‘adequate’” by their two latest reviews.

• Ukraine’s war against Russia: The bill does provide $300 million in aid to Ukraine. It adds that no funding in the bill may be paid to Russia’s Rosoboronexport, its only defense hardware export company, unless it’s determined that Russia is not sending funding to Syria and has halted its war in Ukraine and any and all of its agents’ actions to destabilize Ukraine. The bill does provide $300 million to a “Countering Russian Influence Fund.” The bill explicitly prohibits any funds from going to the Russian government until Ukraine has regained Russian control of all its territory, including Crimea.

• Justice Department: It provides $200 million in funding for a new “Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters” in Greenbelt, Md. The bill does say the president can use none of the funding provided by the act to request any background investigation into any individual by the FBI.

• China-related matters: The bill prohibits any of its funding from going to the purchase of any telecommunications equipment from Huawei Technologies Company or the ZTE Corporation—both of which are Chinese companies. None of the funds in the act can go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and none of them can go to debt service payments owed by any country to any international financial institution or China.

• Fentanyl: Within the Department of State’s budget, the bill orders the creation of further counter-fentanyl programs and allots funding for cracking down on the flow of fentanyl from China, Mexico, and other countries.

• Gaza: The act allots $80 million for Israel’s Iron Dome system, and elsewhere allots $3.3 billion to Israel for advanced weapons systems. The funds within the bill cannot be used to move the U.S. Embassy to Israel away from Jerusalem. None of the bill’s funding can go to supporting an independent Palestinian state unless it is making demonstrable efforts to coexist with Israel peacefully. The act also requires that the Secretary of State and USAID show that U.S. aid sent to Gaza is not diverted to Hamas.

Dig deeper: Read Leo Briceno’s report in The Stew about how Congress passed the first part of the spending bill package.