The vote was 74-24. It came after funding had expired for the agencies at midnight, but the White House sent out a notice shortly after the deadline announcing the Office of Management and Budget had ceased shutdown preparations because there was a high degree of confidence that Congress would pass the legislation and the president would sign it on Saturday.

“Because obligations of federal funds are incurred and tracked on a daily basis, agencies will not shut down and may continue their normal operations,” the White House statement said.

Prospects for a short-term government shutdown had appeared to grow Friday evening after Republicans and Democrats battled over proposed amendments to the bill. Any successful amendments to the bill would have sent the legislation back to the House, which had already left town for a two-week recess.

But shortly before midnight Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a breakthrough.

“It’s been a very long and difficult day, but we have just reached an agreement to complete the job of funding the government,” Schumer said. “It is good for the country that we have reached this bipartisan deal. It wasn’t easy, but tonight our persistence has been worth it.”

While Congress has already approved money for Veterans Affairs, Interior, Agriculture and other agencies, the bill approved this week is much larger, providing funding for the Defense, Homeland Security and State departments and other aspects of general government.

The House passed the bill Friday morning by a vote of 286-134, narrowly gaining the two-thirds majority needed for approval. More than 70% of the money would go to defense.

The vote tally in the House reflected anger among Republicans over the content of the package and the speed with which it was brought to a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson brought the measure to the floor even though a majority of Republicans ended up voting against it. He said afterward that the bill “represents the best achievable outcome in a divided government.”

In sign of the conservative frustration, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., initiated an effort to oust Johnson as the House began the vote but held off on further action until the House returns in two weeks. It’s the same tool that was used last year to remove the last Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California.

The vote breakdown showed 101 Republicans voting for the bill and 112 voting against it. Meanwhile, 185 Democrats voted for the bill and 22 against.

Rep. Kay Granger, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee that helped draft the package, stepped down from that role after the vote. She said she would stay on the committee to provide advice and lead as a teacher for colleagues when needed.

Johnson broke up this fiscal year’s spending bills into two parts as House Republicans revolted against what has become an annual practice of asking them to vote for one massive, complex bill called an omnibus with little time to review it or face a shutdown. Johnson viewed that as a breakthrough, saying the two-part process was “an important step in breaking the omnibus muscle memory.”

Still, the latest package was clearly unpopular with most Republicans, who viewed it as containing too few of their policy priorities and as spending too much.

“The bottom line is that this is a complete and utter surrender,” said Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo.

It took lawmakers six months into the current fiscal year to get near the finish line on government funding, the process slowed by conservatives who pushed for more policy mandates and steeper spending cuts than a Democratic-led Senate or White House would consider. The impasse required several short-term, stopgap spending bills to keep agencies funded.

The first package of full-year spending bills, which funded the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and the Interior, among others, cleared Congress two weeks ago with just hours to spare before funding expired for those agencies.

When combining the two packages, discretionary spending for the budget year will come to about $1.66 trillion. That does not include programs such as Social Security and Medicare, or financing the country’s rising debt.

To win over support from Republicans, Johnson touted some of the spending increases secured for about 8,000 more detention beds for migrants awaiting their immigration proceedings or removal from the country. That’s about a 24% increase from current levels. Also, GOP leadership highlighted more money to hire about 2,000 Border Patrol agents.

Democrats, meanwhile, are boasting of a $1 billion increase for Head Start programs and new child care centers for military families. They also played up a $120 million increase in funding for cancer research and a $100 million increase for Alzheimer’s research.

“Make no mistake, we had to work under very difficult top-line numbers and fight off literally hundreds of extreme Republican poison pills from the House, not to mention some unthinkable cuts,” said Sen. Patty Murray, the Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Sen. Susan Collins, the top Republican on that committee, appealed to her GOP colleagues by stating that the bill’s spending on non-defense programs actually decreases even before accounting for inflation. She called the package “conservative” and “carefully drafted.”

“These bills are not big spending bills that are wildly out of scope,” Collins said.

The spending package largely tracks with an agreement that then-Speaker McCarthy worked out with the White House in May 2023, which restricted spending for two years and suspended the debt ceiling into January 2025 so the federal government could continue paying its bills.

Shalanda Young, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told lawmakers that last year’s agreement, which became the Fiscal Responsibility Act, will save the federal government about $1 trillion over the coming decade.

___

Associated Press congressional correspondent Lisa Mascaro and staff writers Farnoush Amiri and Chris Megerian contributed to this report.

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Democrats were able to swat back scores of policy mandates and some of the steeper budget cuts that House Republicans were seeking to impose on nondefense programs, though House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., highlighted some wins, including a nearly 24% increase in detention beds for migrants awaiting their immigration proceedings or removal from the country.

This year’s spending bills were divided into two packages. The first one cleared Congress two weeks ago, just hours before a shutdown deadline for the agencies funded through the bills.

Now Congress is focused on the second, larger package, which includes about $886 billion for the Defense Department, a more than 3% increase from last year’s levels. The 1,012-page bill also funds the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Labor, and others.

“Congress must now race to pass this package before government funding runs out this Friday,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Nondefense spending will be relatively flat compared with the prior year, though some agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, are taking a hit, and many agencies will not see their budgets keep up with inflation.

When combining the two packages, discretionary spending for the budget year will come to about $1.66 trillion. That does not include programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and financing the country’s rising debt.

The House is expected to take the measure up first on Friday. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., urged Republicans to vote for the measure, noting that more than 70% of the spending goes to defense.

“At at time when the world’s on fire, more than ever, we need to make sure that we are properly funding our nation’s defense and supporting our troops,” Scalise said.

Then it would move to the Senate where senators would have to agree on taking it up expeditiously to avoid a partial shutdown. Usually, such agreements include votes on proposed amendments to the bill.

Johnson described the bill as a serious commitment to strengthening national defense while expanding support for those serving in the military. The bill provides for a 5.2% pay increase for service members.

In promoting the bill, Republicans cited several ways it would help Israel. Most notably, they highlighted a prohibition on funding through March 2025 for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which is the main supplier of food, water and shelter to civilians in Gaza.

Republicans are insisting on cutting off funding to the agency after Israel alleged that a dozen employees of the agency were involved in the attack that Hamas conducted in Israel on Oct. 7.

But the prohibition does concern some lawmakers because many relief agencies say there is no way to replace its ability to deliver the humanitarian assistance that the United States and others are trying to send to Gaza, where one-quarter of the 2.3 million residents are starving.

Democrats emphasized that humanitarian assistance will increase globally though, by about $336.4 million.

Sen. Patty Murray, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, also highlighted a $1 billion increase for Head Start programs and new child care centers for military families. Democrats also played up a $120 million increase in funding for cancer research and a $100 million increase for Alzheimer’s research.

“We defeated outlandish cuts that would have been a gut punch for American families and our economy,” said Murray, D-Wash.

She also said Democrats successfully fought off numerous policy measures, known as riders, that House Republicans were seeking to add.

“From Day 1 of this process, I said there would be no extreme, far-right riders to restrict women’s reproductive freedoms — and there aren’t, she said.

Among the policy provisions that House Republicans did secure was a requirement that only allows for the American flag and “other official flags” to fly over U.S. diplomatic facilities. Under the Biden administration, U.S. embassies have been invited to fly the pride flag or light up with rainbow colors in support of the LGBTQ community.

There is also a provision that prevents the Consumer Product Safety Commission from banning gas stoves. But the White House has said President Joe Biden would not support a ban, and the commission, an independent agency, says no such ban was in the works.

The spending in the bill largely tracks with an agreement that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy worked out with the White House in May 2023, which restricted spending for two years and suspended the debt ceiling into January 2025 so the federal government could continue paying its bills.

Shalanda Young, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told lawmakers Thursday that last year’s agreement, which became the Fiscal Responsibility Act, will save taxpayers about $1 trillion over the coming decade.

McCarthy, R-Calif., was ousted from the speaker’s role a few months after securing the debt ceiling deal. Eight Republicans ended up joining with Democrats in removing McCarthy as speaker. And some of those unhappy with that deal also expressed misgivings about the latest package.

“I hope there will be some modest wins. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that we will get much in the way of significant policy wins based on past history and based on our unwillingness to use any kind of leverage to force policy wins, meaning a willingness to walk away and say no,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va.

Work on the spending bills has been more bipartisan in the Senate. Murray issued a joint statement after the bill’s release with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, urging colleagues to vote for it.

“There is zero need for a shutdown or chaos — and members of Congress should waste no time in passing these six bills, which will greatly benefit every state in America and reflect important priorities of many senators,” Murray and Collins said.

Johnson said that after the spending package passes, the House would next turn its attention to a bill that focuses on aiding Ukraine and Israel, though lawmakers are scheduled to be away from Washington for the next two weeks. The Senate has already approved a $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, but Johnson has declined to bring that up for a vote.

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Six months into the fiscal year, Congress is about halfway home in passing spending measures expected to total about $1.65 trillion. Lawmakers passed the first portion of spending bills in early March, funding about 30% of the government. Now lawmakers are focused on the larger package, and in what has become routine, are brushing up against the deadline when federal funding expires.

Agreement had been reached on five of the six spending bills that make up the second package, but negotiators clashed over the measure that provides funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for securing and managing U.S. borders, among other things. A person familiar with the negotiations but not authorized to discuss them publicly said late Monday that a deal had been reached on the Homeland Security spending. The breakthrough sets the stage for Congress to dodge a partial shutdown.

The stakes for both sides are immense as border security emerges as a central issue in the 2024 campaigns and the flow of migrants crossing the southern border far outpaces the capacity of the U.S. immigration system to deal with it.

Negotiators had been moving toward a simple solution: passing a continuing resolution that would mostly extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security, though with some increase from 2023 spending levels.

But a senior Republican aide said House Republicans pushed for more resources for the border than the continuing resolution would have provided. The White House also eventually rejected the continuing resolution approach but didn’t make that clear in communications with congressional allies until the “11th hour,” the aide said, increasing the risk of a short-term shutdown.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday declined to speak to timelines during the negotiations but emphasized that funding the government is lawmakers’ responsibility.

“It is their job to keep the government open,” she said.

Drilling down more specifically on funding for the Department of Homeland Security, she said the Biden administration has “maximized their operations” and removed more people in the past 10 months than during any year since fiscal year 2013. She said it was important to continue “that operational pace.”

“Obviously, we believe DHS needs additional funding. We’ve always said that,” Jean-Pierre said.

Even with the possible release of legislative text early this week, it’s unclear whether Congress can avoid a brief partial shutdown. House rules call for giving lawmakers 72 hours to review a bill before voting. House Speaker Mike Johnson will then likely have to bring the bill up through a streamlined process requiring two-thirds support to pass.

Most of the “no” votes are expected to come from Republicans, who have been critical of the overall spending levels as well as the lack of policy mandates sought by some conservatives, such as restricting abortion access, eliminating diversity and inclusion programs within federal agencies, and banning gender-affirming care.

Then, the Senate would act on the bill, but it would require all senators to agree on speeding up the process to get to a final vote before the midnight Friday deadline. Such agreements generally require Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to allow for votes on various amendments to the bill in return for an expedited final vote.

The package being finalized this week is expected to provide about $886 billion for the Pentagon. The bill will also fund the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and others.

Overall, the two spending packages provide about a 3% boost for defense, while keeping nondefense spending roughly flat with the year before. That’s in keeping with an agreement that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy worked out with the White House, which restricted spending for two years and suspended the debt ceiling into January 2025 so the federal government could continue paying its bills.

House Republicans have been determined to end the practice of packaging all 12 annual spending bills into one massive bill called an omnibus. They managed this time to break the spending bills into two parts.

___

Associated Press staff writer Chris Megerian contributed to this report.

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Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court, said that officials who use personal accounts to make official statements may not be free to delete comments about those statements or block critics altogether.

On the other hand, Barrett wrote, “State officials have private lives and their own constitutional rights.”

The court ruled in two cases involving lawsuits filed by people who were blocked after leaving critical comments on social media accounts belonging to school board members in Southern California and a city manager in Port Huron, Michigan, northeast of Detroit. They are similar to a case involving Trump and his decision to block critics from his personal account on Twitter, now known as X. The justices dismissed the case after Trump left office in January 2021.

The cases forced the court to deal with the competing free speech rights of public officials and their constituents, all in a rapidly evolving virtual world. They are among five social media cases on the court’s docket this term.

Appeals courts in San Francisco and Cincinnati had reached conflicting decisions about when personal accounts become official, and the high court did not embrace either ruling, returning the cases to the appeals courts to apply the standard the justices laid out Friday.

“When a government official posts about job-related topics on social media, it can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private,” Barrett said.

Officials must have the authority to speak on behalf of their governments and intend to use it for their posts to be regarded essentially as the government’s, Barrett wrote. In such cases, they have to allow criticism, or risk being sued, she wrote.

In one case, James Freed, who was appointed the Port Huron city manager in 2014, used the Facebook page he first created while in college to communicate with the public, as well as recount the details of daily life.

In 2020, a resident, Kevin Lindke, used the page to comment several times from three Facebook profiles, including criticism of the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Freed blocked all three accounts and deleted Lindke’s comments. Lindke sued, but the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Freed, noting that his Facebook page talked about his roles as “father, husband, and city manager.”

The other case involved two elected members of a California school board, the Poway Unified School District Board of Trustees. The members, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane, used their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts to communicate with the public. Two parents, Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, left critical comments and replies to posts on the board members’ accounts and were blocked. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the board members had violated the parents’ free speech rights by doing so. Zane no longer serves on the school board.

The court’s other social media cases have a more partisan flavor. The justices are evaluating Republican-passed laws in Florida and Texas that prohibit large social media companies from taking down posts because of the views they express. The tech companies said the laws violate their First Amendment rights. The laws reflect a view among Republicans that the platforms disproportionately censor conservative viewpoints.

Next week, the court is hearing a challenge from Missouri and Louisiana to the Biden administration’s efforts to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security. The states argue that the Democratic administration has been unconstitutionally coercing the platforms into cracking down on conservative positions.

The cases decided Friday are O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, 22-324, and Lindke v. Freed, 22-611.

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Lawmakers are negotiating a second package of six bills, including defense, in an effort to have all federal agencies fully funded before a March 22 deadline. In the end, total discretionary spending set by Congress is expected to come in at about $1.66 trillion for the full entire year.

A significant number of House Republicans have lined up in opposition to the spending packages, forcing House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to use an expedited process to bring the bill up for a vote. That process requires two-thirds of the House to vote for the measure for it to pass.

The House passed the measure by a vote of 339-85.

The nondefense spending in this year’s bills is relatively flat compared to the previous year. Supporters say that keeping that spending below the rate of inflation is tantamount to a cut, forcing agencies to be more frugal and focus manpower on top priorities. Johnson cited a 10% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency, a 7% cut to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and a 6% cut to the FBI.

But many Republican lawmakers were seeking much steeper cuts and more policy victories. The House Freedom Caucus, which contains dozens of the GOP’s most conservative members, urged Republicans to vote against the first spending package and oppose the second one being negotiated.

“Despite giving Democrats higher spending levels, the omnibus text released so far punts on nearly every single Republican policy priority,” the group said.

Johnson countered that House Republicans have just a two-vote majority in the House while Democrats control the Senate and White House.

“We have to be realistic about what we’re able to achieve,” Johnson said.

Democrats staved off most of the policy riders that House Republicans sought to include in the package. For example, they beat back an effort to block new rules that expand access to the abortion pill mifepristone.

Democrats also said the bill would fully fund a nutrition program for low-income women, infants and children, providing about $7 billion for what is known as the WIC program. That’s a $1 billion increase from the previous year.

As part of those negotiations, House Republicans pushed to give a few states the ability to disallow the purchase of non-nutritious food, such as sugary drinks and snacks, in the food stamp program known as SNAP. The GOP’s effort was unsuccessful for now, but supporters say they’ll try again in next year’s spending bills.

“The bill certainly doesn’t have everything that we may have wanted, but I am very proud to say we successfully defeated the vast majority of the extreme cuts and hundreds of harmful policy riders proposed by the House Republicans,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

House Republicans were able to achieve some policy wins, however. One provision, for example, will prevent the sale of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. Another policy mandate prohibits the Justice Department from investigating parents who exercise free speech at local school board meetings.

Another provision strengthens gun rights for certain veterans.

Under current law, the Department of Veterans Affairs must send a beneficiary’s name to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System whenever a fiduciary is appointed to help manage someone’s benefits because they lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs. This year’s spending package prohibits the department from transmitting that information unless a relevant judicial authority rules that the beneficiary is a danger to himself or herself, or others.

Rep. Mark Takano, the top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said a finding of mental incompetency by the VA is typically based on “very serious mental health conditions like schizophrenia and dementia.”

“They wanted so badly to make sure that vulnerable veterans could access more firearms,” Takano said. “This is wrong. Lives are on the line. Veterans’ lives are on the line, and I will not agree to legislation that will cause more people’s lives to be lost to gun violence.”

Republicans have argued that current VA policy deters some veterans from seeking the care and benefits they have earned.

In a closed-door meeting with the House GOP, Johnson, looking to show that Republicans did get some policy wins in the negotiations, read from a news report about how Democrats were having “heartburn” about the gun provision, according to a Republican familiar with the discussion who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The bills to fund federal agencies are more than five months past due with the budget year beginning Oct. 1. House Republicans are describing an improved process nevertheless, saying they have broken the cycle of passing all the spending bills in one massive package that lawmakers have little time to study before being asked to vote on it or risk a government shutdown.

But critics of the bill, such as Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., were dismissive about how much the process really changed.

The first package covers the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Interior and Transportation, among others.

Democrats overwhelmingly supported the bill, with 207 voting for it and two voting against. The vote among Republicans was 132-83.

“Once again, Democrats protected the American people and delivered the overwhelming majority of votes necessary to get things done,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said.

Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., said he opposed the bill because “I’ve not made any bones about it since I’ve been here. We have to get spending under control and we’ve lost the leverage.”

____

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

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The short-term extension is the fourth in recent months, and many lawmakers expect it to be the last for the current fiscal year. House Speaker Mike Johnson said negotiators had completed six of the annual spending bills that fund federal agencies and had “almost final agreement on the others.”

“We’ll get the job done,” Johnson said as he exited a closed-door meeting with Republican colleagues.

The House acted first Thursday. The vote to approve the extension was 320-99. It easily cleared the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Democrats overwhelmingly voted to avert a partial shutdown. But the vote was much more divided with Republicans, 113 in support and 97 against.

The Senate then took up the bill and approved it during an evening vote of 77-13.

“When we pass this bill, we will have, thank God, avoided a shutdown with all its harmful effects on the American people,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said moments before the vote.

Biden called Thursday night’s vote “good news for the American people” but added, “I want to be clear: this is a short-term fix — not a long-term solution.”

Next week, the House and Senate are expected to take up a package of six spending bills and get them to the president before March 8. Then, lawmakers would work to fund the rest of the government by the new March 22 deadline.

At the end of the process, Congress is expected to have approved more than $1.6 trillion in spending for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. That amount is roughly in line with the previous fiscal year and is what former Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the White House last year before eight disgruntled Republican lawmakers joined with Democrats a few months later and voted to oust him from the position.

Some of the House’s most conservative members wanted deeper cuts for non-defense programs than that agreement allowed through its spending caps. They also sought an array of policy changes that Democrats opposed. They were hoping the prospect of a shutdown could leverage more concessions.

“Last I checked, the Republicans actually have a majority in the House of Representatives, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at our checkbook because we are all too willing to continue the policy choices of Joe Biden and the spending levels of Nancy Pelosi,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.

But Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., countered before the vote that shutdowns are damaging and encouraged lawmakers to vote for the short-term extension.

“I want the American people to know, Mr. Speaker, that this negotiation has been difficult, but to close the government down at a time like this would hurt people who should not be hurt,” Fleischmann said.

The split within the GOP conference on spending and their tiny House majority bogged down the efforts to get the bills passed on a timely basis. With the Senate also struggling to complete work on all 12 appropriations bills, lawmakers have resorted to a series of short-term measures to keep the government funded.

Republican leadership said that the broader funding legislation being teed up for votes in March would lead to spending cuts for many nondefense agencies. By dividing the spending bill up into chunks, they are hoping to avoid an omnibus bill — a massive, all-encompassing bill that lawmakers generally had little time to digest or understand before voting on it. Republicans vowed there would be no omnibus this time.

“When you take away Defense and Veterans Affairs, the rest of the agencies are going to be seeing spending cuts in many cases,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La. “There are also some policy changes that we pushed through the House that will be in the final product. Of course, some of those are still being negotiated.”

The temporary extension funds the departments of Agriculture, Transportation, Interior and others through March 8. It funds the Pentagon, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and the State Department through March 22.

While congressional leaders have said they’ve reached final agreement on what will be in the first package of spending bills voted on next week, there’s still room for an impasse on the second package to be voted on later in the month.

“We are working in a divided government. That means to get anything done, we have to work together, in good faith to reach reasonable outcomes,” said Sen. Patty Murray, the Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The renewed focus on this year’s spending bills doesn’t include the separate, $95.3 billion aid package that the Senate approved for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan earlier this month, with much of that money being spent in the U.S. to replenish America’s military arsenal. The bill also contained about $9 billion in humanitarian assistance for civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine and other war zones.

In his statement Thursday, Biden said, “It is time for House Republicans to put our national security first and move with urgency to get this bipartisan bill to my desk.”

Biden had summoned congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday, during which he and others urged Johnson to also move forward with the aid package. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the U.S. can’t afford to wait months to provide more military assistance to Ukraine, which is running short of the arms and ammunition necessary to repel Russia’s military invasion.

“We’ve got a lot of priorities before us, but we have to get the government funded and secure our border and then we’ll address everything else,” Johnson told reporters upon exiting his meeting with GOP colleagues.

Democrats urged quicker action on Ukraine as the temporary spending bill was debated.

“Without swift action, the legacy of this Congress will be the destruction of Ukraine, the appeasement of a dictator, and the abandonment of starving children and ailing families,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

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Under the new plan, Congress would temporarily fund one set of federal agencies through March 8 and another set through March 22. In the meantime, Congress will try to draft and pass packages of legislation to fund the government for the remainder of the budget year.

But there was no immediate plan to approve the $95 billion emergency national security funds for Ukraine, Israel and other allies.

“We are in agreement that Congress must work in a bipartisan manner to fund our government,” said the joint statement from House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, along with the Appropriation Committee leaders.

Johnson said the House would vote Thursday to approve the temporary funds — ahead of Friday’s deadline, when some federal monies run out. The Senate would be expected to vote next.

The deal comes together as negotiators in Congress have been working furiously to finish up a federal spending plan and Washington joined Ukraine and other American allies around the world in watching and waiting for Johnson’s next move.

The new Republican leader is facing the test of his career trying to keep the U.S. government open by Friday’s midnight deadline for several federal departments. At the same time, emergency funding for Ukraine, Israel and Indo-Pacific allies remains stubbornly stalled. President Joe Biden convened leaders Tuesday in hopes of pushing them toward a deal.

“As the President and Congressional Leaders made clear at yesterday’s meeting, we cannot allow a government shutdown,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. She said the agreement reached would help prevent a “needless” federal shutdown.

Congress is in what has become a familiar cycle of threatened shutdowns and disruptions as hard-right Republicans in Johnson’s majority strive for steeper spending reductions than Democrats and even some other Republicans are willing to accept. This would be the fourth short-term funding extension in about five months.

While Johnson, R-La., inherited a difficult dynamic, it was only compounded after his majority shrunk further when Democrat Tom Suozzi of New York was sworn in Wednesday to boisterous applause from Democrats and visitors in the galleries following the special election to replace ousted GOP Rep. George Santos. The House is split 213-219, leaving Johnson no room for dissent.

Congressional leaders said they reached an agreement on six bills that will adhere to spending levels previously agreed to last year.

Those bills involve Veterans Affairs and the departments of Agriculture, Transportation, Interior and others and will be voted on and enacted before March 8.

The remaining six bills for the Pentagon, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and the State Department still need to be finalized, voted on and enacted before March 22.

Leaders said a short-term extension would be voted on this week so that funding would continue for agencies while lawmakers worked on the two packages. Lawmakers would be given 72 hours to review the broader legislative packages, as is expected under House rules.

If the deal and the subsequent bills are approved, it would keep the federal government funded until the end of the budget year, on Sept. 30, and avoid more short-term measures.

Top military officials said at a Pentagon briefing that the delay in passing a 2024 budget has affected the military as it has responded to crises over the past several months without additional new money to do so.

Gabe Camarillo, the Army undersecretary, said that with continued funding delays, “we have some very significant costs that we’re going to have to overcome.”

Meanwhile, Western allies are keeping close tabs on Johnson to see whether he will consider Biden’s request for $95 billion in emergency funds for Ukraine and the overseas national security needs.

The Senate overwhelmingly approved the $95 billion supplemental request earlier this month that includes $60 billion for Ukraine as its military runs short of munitions to fight Russian President Vladimir Putin. About half the Ukraine money would boost U.S. defense manufacturing as part of the war effort.

Biden hosted Schumer, Johnson, McConnell, R-Ky., and Jeffries, D-N.Y., in the Oval Office on Tuesday with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The meeting was something of a pile-on as Johnson, who has endorsed Donald Trump in the Republican presidential race, was the only leader reluctant to help Ukraine as prioritizes a U.S.-Mexico border security deal despite rejecting an earlier proposal that collapsed. Biden pulled Johnson aside for a private conversation.

Biden told the lawmakers, “it’s Congress responsibility to fund the government.”

Without funding by Friday thousands of government employees could be furloughed and federal government offices and services temporarily shuttered or unavailable.

Biden warned that a government shutdown would damage the economy “significantly. We need a bipartisan solution.”

—-

Associated Press writers Tara Copp, Seung Min Kim and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.

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Biden called the leaders to the White House in hopes of making progress against a legislative logjam on Capitol Hill that has major ramifications not just for the U.S. but for the world as Ukraine struggles to repel Russia’s invasion with weapons and ammunition starting to run short.

“The need is urgent,” Biden said of the Ukraine aid. “The consequences of inaction every day in Ukraine are dire.”

Biden hosted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the Oval Office along with Republican House Speaker Johnson and Vice President Kamala Harris. After the more than hour-long meeting, Biden pulled Johnson aside for a private conversation.

Democratic leaders upon exiting the meeting were blunt about the dangers Ukraine is facing.

“We said to the speaker, ‘get it done,” said Schumer. “I said I’ve been around here a long time, it’s maybe four or five times that history is looking over your shoulder and if you don’t do the right thing, whatever the immediate politics are, you will regret it.

Referring to Johnson, he said, “Really, it’s in his hands. It’s in his hands.”

Schumer, who was joined by Jeffries in describing how the meeting went, called the session “one of the most intense I’ve ever encountered” in the Oval Office.

Johnson spoke to reporters on his own, without Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell by his side. McConnell voted for a $95 billion foreign aid bill earlier this month that would aid Ukraine and Israel, replenish U.S. defense systems and provide humanitarian assistance for Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine and other populations caught in conflict zones. The bill passed the Senate 70-29, but the Republican-led House has not acted on it, despite pleas from McConnell and others for action.

Johnson, who rejected a U.S. Mexico border security compromise that was eventually stripped from the final product, signaled no change in his position on Ukraine aid. He said the Senate’s package “does nothing” to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, the GOP’s demand in return for helping Ukraine.

“The first priority of the country is our border, and making it secure,” Johnson said.

The speaker’s continued call for border changes has frustrated senators, who spent months negotiating a bipartisan border deal only to have House Republicans reject it at the urging of former President Donald Trump. The bill would have denied migrants the ability to apply for asylum at the border if the number of daily crossings became unmanageable for authorities, among other major changes.

“It’s time for action” Johnson said of the border. “It is a catastrophe, and it must stop.”

Schumer said Democrats, too, want to tackle the problems at the U.S-Mexico border, but that it will take time and “we have to do Ukraine right now.” He said he discussed during the meeting his visit last week to Ukraine with other lawmakers and recounted the agonizing stories told by soldiers who have no ammunition left to fire.

In the meeting, “we made it clear how vital this was to the United States. This was so, so important, and that we couldn’t afford to wait a month or two months or three months, because we would in all likelihood lose the war, NATO would be fractured at best, allies would turn away from the United States, and the boldest leaders, the boldest autocrats of the world … would be emboldened,” he said.

Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns also joined Tuesday’s meeting. Burns has played key roles coordinating the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as efforts to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

McConnell upon returning from the meeting called on the House to take up the Senate-passed bill. Many supporters of the bill predict that it would pass overwhelmingly on the House floor if Johnson were to bring it up for a vote, but doing so would risk enormous blowback from some in his conference who don’t support any more help for Ukraine. Some have even threatened his job if he allows the bill to pass.

“We don’t want the Russians to win in Ukraine and so we have a time problem here. And the best way to move quickly and get the bill to the president would be for the House to take up the Senate bill,” McConnell said.

Apart from the national security package, government funding for agriculture, transportation, military construction and some veterans’ services expires Friday. And funding for the rest of the government, including the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, expires a week later, on March 8, the day after Biden is set to deliver his State of the Union address.

“It’s Congress responsibility to fund the government,” Biden said. “A government shutdown would damage the economy significantly. We need a bipartisan solution.”

The congressional leaders seemed more hopeful that they would be able to prevent any shutdown, though it may require another short-term extension to be passed this week.

“We are making real progress on the appropriations bills that are scheduled to lapse on March 1,” Jeffries said. “And I’m cautiously optimistic that we can do what is necessary within the next day or so to close down these bills and avoid a government shutdown.”

“We believe that we can get to agreement on these issues and prevent a government shutdown. And that’s our first responsibility,” Johnson said.

——

Associated Press reporters Stephen Groves and Will Weissert contributed.

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The 30-day review was submitted to Austin on Thursday.

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said portions of the review are classified but the department will release what it can of the review.

Austin has been scrutinized for keeping secret his prostate cancer diagnosis in early December, his surgery and his hospitalization on Jan. 1, when he began suffering complications from the procedure.

Ryder has acknowledged that he and other public affairs and defense aides were told on Jan. 2, that Austin had been hospitalized but did not make it public and did not tell the military service leaders or the National Security Council until Jan. 4. Only then did President Joe Biden find out.

It took another four days before the reason for his hospitalization was disclosed.

And while he transferred decision-making authorities to Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks during his initial surgery on Dec. 22, and then again when he was in intensive care in early January, he did not tell her why.

The review was directed on Jan. 8, by Austin’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, and was done by Jennifer Walsh, the Pentagon’s director of administration and management.

In a memo released at the time, Magsamen said the review should include a timeline of events and notifications after Austin was taken to the hospital by ambulance on Jan. 1. She said it must examine the existing process for when a secretary transfers decision-making authorities and who should be notified, and make recommendations for improvement.

Magsamen’s memo also made some interim changes to vastly expand the number of people who must be notified in future transfers of authority and that they must provide a reason.

Officials have said that the reason has never been included in routine transfers. According to the memo, a wider array of officials will be notified, including the Pentagon’s general counsel, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the combatant commanders, service secretaries, the service chiefs, the White House Situation Room, and the senior staff of the secretary and deputy secretary.

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Tax revenues are expected to rise by as much as $561 billion from 2024 to 2034, thanks to stepped-up enforcement made possible with money from the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in August 2022.

The Congressional Budget Office in 2022 estimated that the tens of billions of new IRS funding provided by the IRA would increase revenues by $180.4 billion from 2022 to 2031. The IRS now says that if IRA funding is restored, renewed and diversified, estimated revenues could reach as much as $851 billion from 2024 to 2034.

Administration officials are using the report to promote President Joe Biden’s economic agenda as he campaigns for reelection — and as the IRS continually faces threats to its funding.

“This analysis demonstrates that President Biden’s investment in rebuilding the IRS will reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars by making the wealthy and big corporations pay the taxes they owe,” National Economic Adviser Lael Brainard said in a statement.

“Congressional Republicans’ efforts to cut IRS funding show that they prioritize letting the wealthiest Americans and big corporations evade their taxes over cutting the deficit,” Brainard said.

The Inflation Reduction Act gave the IRS an $80 billion infusion of funds. However, House Republicans built a $1.4 billion reduction to the IRS into the debt ceiling and budget cuts package passed by Congress last summer. A separate agreement took an additional $20 billion from the IRS over the next two years to divert to other non-defense programs.

Since then, the agency has tried to show how it is spending the money it has left, in hopes of stemming the cuts. New customer service improvements rolled out as the tax season began Jan. 29, and earlier this month the IRS announced that it had recouped half a billion dollars in back taxes from rich tax cheats.

Rep. Jason Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement that the report “calls for even more IRS funding, uses pie-in-the-sky numbers, all without being straightforward about where the burdens of massive new enforcement efforts will fall.” He said increased funding will inevitably result in hundreds of thousands of additional audits for taxpayers making less than $75,000.

After the IRA was signed into law, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen directed IRS leadership not to increase audit rates on people making less than $400,000 a year annually.

Ensuring that people actually pay their taxes is one of the tax collection agency’s biggest challenges. The audit rate of millionaires fell by more than 70% from 2010 to 2019 and the audit rate on large corporations fell by more than 50%, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis Greg Leiserson told reporters. IRA funding “is enabling the IRS to reverse this trend,” Leiserson said.

The tax gap — which is the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid — has grown to more than $600 billion annually, according to the IRS.

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Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in front of a court that, like the rest of the federal judiciary, was remade during Donald Trump’s presidency by conservative interests that were motivated as much by weakening the regulatory state as social issues including abortion.

The court heard three and a half hours of arguments in two challenges brought by commercial fishermen to a fee requirement, though the facts of their cases were barely discussed in the courtroom.

Instead, the focus was on whether the court should overturn the 1984 case colloquially known as Chevron, a decision that has been the basis for upholding a wide range of regulations public health, workplace safety and consumer protections.

Lower courts used the Chevron decision to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that herring fishermen pay for government-mandated observers who track their fish intake.

Two of Trump’s appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh led the attack on the Chevron decision, which says that when laws aren’t crystal clear, federal agencies, and the experts that serve in them, should be allowed to fill in the details as long as they come up with a reasonable interpretation.

Gorsuch noted that some judges invoke the Chevron doctrine frequently and others, not at all. “Shouldn’t that be a clue that something needs to be fixed here?” Gorsuch asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, defending the decision on behalf of the Biden administration.

When Prelogar talked about the shock to the legal system that would result from overturning such a longstanding and far-reaching precedent, Kavanaugh suggested that Chevron is to blame for the regulatory flip-flops that happen when a president of one party replaces a president of the other.

“The reality of how this works is that Chevron itself ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years whenever a new administration comes in,” Kavanaugh said.

The outcome seems likely to come down to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third appointee. Barrett suggested a “flood of litigation” challenging long-standing regulations that might result from overturning Chevron.

The court could stop short of jettisoning the Chevron decision and instead instruct lower courts to be less deferential to agencies, which might make it harder to sustain regulations. That outcome would be much less than what the conservative and business interests backing the Supreme Court cases want.

The court’s three liberal justices seemed like sure votes to preserve the decision. Justice Elena Kagan used the example of a hypothetical law dealing with artificial intelligence to say it is unreasonable to expect Congress to write laws with too much specificity, especially with the pace of technological change.

“Congress knows that there are going to be gaps because Congress can hardly see a week in the future with respect to this subject, let alone a year or a decade in the future,” Kagan said.

She added, “judges should know what they don’t know.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said getting rid of Chevron could empower judges to rule in favor of their own policy preferences when evaluating regulations.

“I’m worried about the courts becoming uber-legislators,” Jackson said.

That was a concern that Justice John Paul Stevens voiced in his opinion for the court in 1984, explaining why they should play a limited role. The court ruled 6-0, with three justices recused.

“Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of government,” Stevens wrote.

But the current high court, with a 6-3 conservative majority has been increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, along with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have questioned the Chevron decision. The justices haven’t invoked Chevron since 2016, but lower courts continue to do so.

In recent years, conservative justices have shot down a vaccine mandate and Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, and also restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight climate change by regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

This term, the justices also are weighing challenges to aspects of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Opponents of the Chevron doctrine argue that judges apply it too often to rubber-stamp decisions made by government bureaucrats. Judges must exercise their own authority and judgment to say what the law is, lawyer Roman Martinez said on behalf of the company that owns the Rhode Island-based Relentless and Persistence fishing boats.

“It mandates judicial bias and encourages agency overreach. And by removing key checks on executive power, it threatens individual liberty,” Martinez said.

Defending the rulings that upheld the fees, the Biden administration said that overturning the Chevron decision would produce a “convulsive shock” to the legal system.

“Chevron gives appropriate weight to the expertise, often of a scientific or technical nature, that federal agencies can bring to bear in interpreting federal statutes,” Prelogar wrote in a Supreme Court filing.

Environmental, health advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, organized labor and Democrats on the national and state level are urging the court to leave the Chevron decision in place.

Gun, e-cigarette, farm, timber and home-building groups are among the business groups supporting the fishermen. Conservative interests that also intervened in recent high court cases limiting regulation of air and water pollution are backing the fishermen as well.

The justices heard two cases on the same issue because Jackson is recused in one case, from New Jersey. She took part in it at an earlier stage when she was an appeals court judge. The full court is participating in the case from Rhode Island, which the justices added to their docket several months later.

A decision is expected by early summer.

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The agreement largely hews to spending caps for defense and domestic programs that Congress set as part of a bill to suspend the debt limit until 2025. But it does provide some concessions to House Republicans who viewed the spending restrictions in that agreement as insufficient.

In a letter to colleagues, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday the agreement would secure $16 billion in additional spending cuts from the previous agreement brokered by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden and is about $30 billion less than what the Senate was considering.

“This represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,” Johnson writes.

Biden said the agreement “moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities.”

“It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties and signed into law last spring,” Biden said in a statement. “It rejects deep cuts to programs hardworking families count on, and provides a path to passing full-year funding bills that deliver for the American people and are free of any extreme policies.”

The agreement speeds up the roughly $20 billion in cuts already agreed to for the Internal Revenue Service and rescinds about $6 billion in COVID relief money that had been approved but not yet spent, according to Johnson’s letter.

“It’s a good deal for Democrats and the country,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told colleagues in a briefing call.

Essentially, Democrats see the trade-offs they made as mild. In a description provided to reporters, they said the COVID savings would have “no significant impact on any current projects or activities in motion.” And they said that moving all of the $20.2 billion in IRS cuts to this year instead of over two years would still leave the agency able to maintain “critical investments” that Congress provided in 2022. At the time, Congress provided the IRS with an additional $80 billion that could be spent over 10 years.

Overall, the agreement calls for $886 billion in defense funding. It would provide $772 billion in domestic, non-defense spending, when including $69 billion called for in a side deal to the debt ceiling bill that McCarthy had reached with the White House, Democrats said.

The most conservative House Republicans opposed the earlier debt ceiling agreement and even brought House proceedings to a halt for a few days to show their displeasure. Many were surely wanting additional concessions, but Democrats have been insistent on abiding by the debt ceiling agreement’s spending caps, leaving Johnson in a difficult spot.

“It’s even worse than we thought,” the House Freedom Caucus said of the agreement in a tweet posted on X. “This is total failure.”

Lawmakers needed an agreement on overall spending levels so that appropriators could write the bills that set line-by-line funding for agencies. Money is set to lapse Jan. 19 for some agencies and Feb. 2 for others.

The agreement is separate from the negotiations that are taking place to secure additional funding for Israel and Ukraine while also curbing restrictions on asylum claims at the U.S. border.

In a joint statement, Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries voiced their support for the agreement.

“It will also allow us to keep the investments for hardworking American families secured by the legislative achievements of President Biden and Congressional Democrats,” Schumer and Jeffries said.

But they also warned House Republicans about trying to add conservative policy riders to the bills in the coming days, saying Democrats would not support “poison pill policy changes in any of the twelve appropriations bills put before the Congress.“

Rep. Patrick McHenry, who helped lead the debt ceiling negotiations when McCarthy was speaker, noted that two-thirds of both parties in the House supported that agreement.

“This deal, which adheres to that framework, deserves equally as robust support,” McHenry said.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tweeted that he was encouraged that leaders identified a “path toward completing” the spending bills. It was a cautious recognition that some obstacles could lie ahead.

“America faces serious national security challenges, and Congress must act quickly to deliver the full-year resources this moment requires,” McConnell said.

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A group called Defend Arlington, affiliated with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed a lawsuit Sunday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, seeking the restraining order. A hearing has been scheduled for Wednesday.

Work to remove the memorial had begun Monday before the restraining order was issued, but the memorial remains in place on cemetery grounds.

A cemetery spokesperson said Monday that Arlington is complying with the restraining order, but referred all other questions to the Justice Department.

The cemetery had said on Friday that it expected to complete the removal this week. It said the removal was required by Congress, and that it was complying with environmental and historic-preservation regulations.

But the lawsuit accused the Army, which runs the cemetery, of violating regulations in seeking a hasty removal of the memorial.

“The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places,” the lawsuit accuses.

The temporary restraining order issued Monday by U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston said that a lawyer for the plaintiffs represented to the court that the work at the memorial involves the disturbance of gravesites.

In a footnote, Alston wrote that he “takes very seriously the representations of officers of the Court and should the representations in this case be untrue or exaggerated the Court may take appropriate sanctions.”

On Friday, the cemetery had said in its statement that “the area around the Memorial will be protected to ensure no impact to the surrounding landscape and grave markers.”

Last week, a federal judge in the District of Columbia dismissed a lawsuit seeking to block removal of the memorial filed by the same plaintiffs. Alston, in his order issued Monday, told the parties to be prepared to discuss how that case affects his decision whether to extend his temporary restraining order beyond Wednesday.

David McCallister, a spokesman for the Florida heritage group, welcomed the judge’s order while acknowledging it is only temporary. He said the current case differs from the one that was dismissed because they now have evidence that the work is being done in a way that disturbs grave sites.

Generally, he said the memorial promotes reconciliation between North and South, and removing it erodes that reconciliation.

The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American South. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.

Last year an independent commission recommended the memorial be taken down as part of a report to Congress on renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.

More than 40 House Republicans wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently, arguing that the commission overstepped its authority when it recommended that the monument be removed.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disagrees with the decision and plans to move the monument to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley, Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said.

___

Freelance photographer Kevin Wolf contributed to this report from Arlington.

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The $886 billion bill was approved by a vote of 310-118 and now goes to President Joe Biden after the Senate had overwhelmingly passed it Wednesday. It is likely the last piece of major legislation Congress will consider before leaving for the holiday break, though negotiations continue on a bill to aid Ukraine and Israel and boost border security.

The spending called for represents about a 3% increase from the prior year. The bill serves as a blueprint for programs Congress will seek to fund through follow-up spending bills.

Lawmakers have been negotiating a final defense policy bill for months after each chamber passed strikingly different versions in July. Some of the priorities championed by social conservatives were a no-go for Democrats. Negotiators dropped them from the final version to get it over the finish line.

That did not go over well with some Republican lawmakers, though most did end up voting for a bill that traditionally has broad, bipartisan support. About twice as many Republicans voted for the bill as voted against it.

“You almost feel like a parent who’s sent a child off to summer camp and they came back a monster,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said in opposing the bill. “That’s what we’ve done. This bill came back in far worse shape.”

As an example, Gaetz said the House bill eliminated the position of the chief diversity officer at the Defense Department, but the final measure did not include that provision.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, chided the bill’s critics for what he described as an unwillingness to compromise.

“Apparently, you don’t like democracy because that’s what democracy is. You compromise and you work with people and you do it all the time,” Smith said.

Most notably, the bill does not include language sought by House Republicans to restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender service members and it does not block the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy, which allows reimbursement for travel expenses when a service member has to go out of state for an abortion or other reproductive care.

Republicans did win some concessions on diversity and inclusion training in the military. For example, the bill freezes hiring for such training until a full accounting of the programming and costs is completed and reported to Congress.

One of the most divisive aspects of the bill was a short-term extension of a surveillance program aimed at preventing terrorism and catching spies. The program has detractors on both sides of the political aisle who view it as a threat to the privacy of ordinary Americans.

Some House Republicans were incensed that the extension was included in the defense policy bill and not voted upon separately through other legislation that included proposed changes to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

The extension continues a tool that permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence.

U.S. officials have said the tool, first authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, is crucial in disrupting terror attacks, cyber intrusions and other national security threats. It has produced vital intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations, such as the killing last year of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.

But the administration’s efforts to secure reauthorization of the program have encountered strong bipartisan pushback. Lawmakers are demanding better privacy protections for those Americans caught up in the monitoring. They wanted a separate vote on legislation making changes to the program.

“The FBI under President Biden has been weaponized against the American people and major reform is needed,” said Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont. “FISA should not be combined with our national defense. And it is unacceptable that leadership is bypassing regular order to jam members by forcing them to vote on two unrelated bills with one vote.”

Matthew G. Olsen, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, praised the passage of the extension.

He said: “We cannot afford to be blinded to the many threats we face from foreign adversaries, including Iran and China, as well as terrorist organizations like Hamas and ISIS,” or the Islamic State group.

Enough opposition to the bill had developed within the GOP ranks that it forced House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to tee up the defense policy bill for a vote through a process generally reserved for noncontroversial legislation.

Under that process, at least two-thirds of the House had to vote in favor of the legislation for it to pass, but going that route avoided the prospect of a small number of Republicans blocking it from the floor.

Consideration of the bill comes at a dangerous time for the world, with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and as China increasingly flexes its military might in the South China Sea.

On Ukraine, the bill includes the creation of a special inspector general for Ukraine to address concerns about whether taxpayer dollars are being spent in Ukraine as intended. That’s on top of oversight work already being conducted by other agency watchdogs.

“We will continue to stay on top of this, but I want to assure my colleagues that there has been no evidence of diversion of weapons provided to Ukraine or any other assistance,” GOP Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told lawmakers this week in advocating for the bill.

Ukraine’s supporters in Congress have argued that helping Kyiv now could prevent a wider war if Russia were to invade a member of NATO, the military alliance that maintains that an attack against one member nation is considered an attack against all.

The bill includes provisions by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., that says the president must get the advice and consent of the Senate or an act of Congress before withdrawing U.S. membership from NATO. That seems to have in mind former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, who has said he will continue to “fundamentally reevaluate” NATO’s purpose and mission.

On China, the bill establishes a new training program with Taiwan, requires a plan to accelerate deliveries of Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Taiwan, and approves an agreement that enables Australia to access nuclear-powered submarines, which are stealthier and more capable than conventionally powered vessels.

__

Associated Press staff writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

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Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira is accused of leaking highly classified military from the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts where he worked.

The punitive actions range from relieving personnel from their positions, including command positions, to non-judicial punishment under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Teixeira, who’s 21, has been behind bars since his April arrest on charges stemming from the most consequential intelligence leak in years. He is charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized retention and transmission of classified national defense information. He has pleaded not guilty, and no trial date has been set.

Prosecutors said in a court filing last week that the two sides have not yet engaged in “substantive” plea discussions.

Teixeira enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2019. He shared military secrets he illegally collected from his intelligence unit with other Discord users, authorities said — first by typing out classified documents he accessed and then sharing photographs of files that bore SECRET and TOP SECRET markings.

In its investigation of the leaks, the Air Force inspector general found both security gaps occurred in part because personnel had access to classified documents without supervision, and because in instances where Airman 1st Class Teixeira was caught violating security policies none of the personnel who either witnessed the violations or had responsibility for Teixeira took the actions necessary in response.

Teixeira worked as a cyber transport systems specialist, essentially an information technology specialist responsible for military communications networks. As such, Teixeira had often unsupervised access as part of a three-person team at night to Top Secret-Secret Compartmentalized facility to perform maintenance inspections. Teixeira remains in the Air National Guard in an unpaid status, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said.

“At times, members were required to perform preventive maintenance inspections and other tasks, which required individuals to be on their own for hours, unsupervised in other parts of the facility,” the IG found. “Further, no permission controls were in place to monitor print jobs, and there were no business rules for print products. Any night shift member had ample opportunity to access (classified) sites and print a high volume of products without supervision or detection.”

Inside Teixeira’s 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron, members had what the IG described as a “more complete” picture of the breadth of Teixeira’s active unauthorized intelligence-seeking but “intentionally failed to report the full details of these security concerns” because they thought security officials might overreact, the IG found.

For example, in fall 2022 Teixeira was seen writing down notes from a classified document onto a Post-It note. While he was confronted about the note, there was no follow up to ensure the note had been shredded and the incident was not reported to security officers.

It was not until a January 2023 incident that the appropriate security officials were notified, but even then security officials were not briefed on the full scope of the violations.

If any of the personnel had taken the appropriate actions, “the length and depth of the unauthorized and unlawful disclosures by several months,” the IG found.

Those unit officials “who understood their duty to report specific information regarding A1C Teixeira’s intelligence-seeking and insider threat indicators to security officials, intentionally failed to do so.”

But the IG also said the unit’s own policy, which encouraged its tech support service members to attend intelligence briefings “to better understand the mission and the importance of keeping the classified networks operating,” was improper and problematic because it exposed the service members to higher levels of classified material than they needed to know.

The documents released on social media revealed sensitive U.S. intelligence on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Middle East and an array of other topics.

As a result of the security breach, Col. Sean Riley, 102nd Intelligence Wing commander, received administrative action and was relieved of command and the 102nd Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group commander Col. Enrique Dovalo, received administrative action for concerns with unit culture and compliance with policies and standards.

The Air Force also said previously suspended commanders from the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron and the detachment overseeing administrative support for airmen at the unit mobilized for duty under Title 10 USC were permanently removed.

The Air Force took the intelligence mission from the 102nd after Teixeira’s leaks were discovered and the group’s mission remains reassigned to other units.

___

Associated Press writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed from Boston.

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