Biden budget plan won’t reach Capitol Hill for another month – By Leo Shane III (Federal Times) / Feb 11, 2024
By the second week in February lawmakers are supposed to be busy picking apart the White House’ budget request with an eye towards policy debates in coming months. But the process hasn’t worked that way in recent years.
Administration officials earlier this month announced their fiscal 2025 budget proposal would arrive more than a month late — on March 11 — marking the fourth consecutive year that Biden has missed the statutory deadline for a spending plan in early February.
Republican House Budget Committee members last week blasted the delay as another financial misstep by the administration. But each of the last four presidents missed that filing deadline at least once during their time in the White House, slowly making the February target date more of a guidepost than a mandate.
And the upcoming budget proposal is complicated by the fact that lawmakers still have not finalized their work on the fiscal 2024 budget, even though the new fiscal year began on Oct. 1. Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget plan is scheduled to be released three days after the next deadline for Congress to pass a funding extension or trigger a partial government shutdown.
