Yahoo Finance Covid and government spending: How a lame-duck Trump could blow up Washington on his way out the door
There has never been much precedent for how Donald Trump has governed in the White House over the last four years, so it makes sense that even the keenest Washington observers haven’t a clue how the outgoing president will behave in his final two months in office.
The stakes are high: Mr Trump and the 116th Congress are facing deadlines to fund the US military, avoid a government shutdown, and infuse the US economy with another round of crucial pandemic relief.
All that while the coronavirus pandemic rages as unrelentingly as ever and the country remains fiercely divided along partisan lines.
(As many as two in three registered Republicans believe, erroneously, that widespread voter fraud may have swung the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a narrative the president himself created and GOP leaders in Congress have passively allowed to gain momentum.)
The key circumstance informing how Mr Trump will govern over the next eight weeks is that he is already concocting plans to run again in 2024, several American news outlets have confirmed.
Unlike most lame-duck presidents, he is still governing with political calculations in mind.
Characteristically, they’re front and centre, as they have been throughout his administration, jeopardising a smooth transition and casting a haze of uncertainty over Congress as it has just weeks — or even days, in the case of averting a third government shutdown in four years — to keep the country operating semi-functionally.
You’d have to travel back to the closing days of the 19th century to witness the last recently defeated US president who has indicated his intent to run again in four years.
Even then, Grover Cleveland, the 22nd (and 24th) president who lost to Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election before beating Harrison in an 1892 rematch, did not take nearly the same approach to lame-duck governance as Mr Trump has taken in the twilight of 2020.
Here are the three main areas where the president is threatening to discharge a stick of dynamite on his way out the door.
1. Keeping the government from shutting down
Mr Trump has displayed a steelier resolve than any president before him to shut down the government, presiding over two separate lapses in federal funding over the last four years to try to strong-arm Democrats on immigration.
It did not work.
Mr Trump never coaxed as much money as he wanted from Congress for his US-Mexico border wall, instead resorting to siphoning money away from Defense Department projects to erect miles of slatted fencing that remains incomplete as Mr Biden enters the White House.
The Trump administration has issued vague warnings once again that he could tank whatever agreement emerges from negotiations between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who both appear likely to retain their gavels into the next Congress.
The GOP-controlled Senate’s Homeland Security bill includes the $2bn requested by Mr Trump for his border wall. The Democratic-controlled House’s sister bill does not. In fact, it would cut the $1.4 billion from last year’s spending agreement earmarked for border wall construction.
Congressional leaders are bullish on passing a catchall, bipartisan “omnibus” bill that would fund each of the 12 areas of the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2021.
Or Ms Pelosi and Mr McConnell could punt on a brand new spending deal and sign another so-called “continuing resolution” (“CR” for shorthand). That’s Washington-speak for a bill that extends the previous fiscal year’s funding levels for the various departments and programmes that comprise the federal government — from the National Parks Service, to the Department of Homeland Security that oversees immigration, to the Legislative Branch (ie. Congress).
CRs are considered bad governance because they essentially extend last year’s spending levels even though the present circumstances may have completely shifted. For example, the government spending deal for fiscal year 2020 did not include any federal appropriations to deal with the pandemic. That’s because it was signed months before the coronavirus actually hit US shores.
With Mr Trump leaving office in January, he has very little leverage — conventionally speaking — over the spending negotiations since dragging out the process would allow his Democratic successor to take over the role of providing the presidential signature to make any bill a law.
2. Defence bill
Here’s where Mr Trump could really test his political staying power.
For the last 59 years, Congress and the president have been able to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that guides military spending levels, troop deployments around the world, and other policy parameters.
This year, Republicans and Democrats have already reached bipartisan agreements in both the House and Senate, with only minor differences to be sorted out between the two chambers’ bills.
Mr Trump has committed to vetoing that final product if it contains a provision — both bills currently do — forcing the military to rechristen bases named for Confederate figureheads such as Generals Robert E Lee, Henry L Benning, John Bell Hood, and seven others.
The president issued that veto threat this summer, and he has not wavered, two Capitol Hill sources have confirmed to The Independent.
"I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill if the Elizabeth 'Pocahantas' Warren (of all people!) Amendment which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars, is in the Bill!" he tweeted in July.
If he holds his ground, Congress could remove the language from its bill, in which case Mr Biden has indicated he would change the names of the bases via executive order. But executive orders are liable to be rolled back with each new administration, so the name changes would not be as permanent as if they were codified in legislation.
3. Covid relief
The outgoing president has been one of the chief proponents of another round of $1,200 stimulus checks for American taxpayers as part of a multi-trillion dollar package to deal with the economic and health care system fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
Such profligate priorities have at times put him more at loggerheads with Mr McConnell and a cadre of born-again deficit hawks in the Senate GOP than with Ms Pelosi, whom Mr Trump has said he’d be more than happy to outspend.
The administration’s latest official offer was $1.8trn, nearly half a trillion dollars short of Democrats’ latest asking price.
That all came before Mr Trump’s 2020 election loss, though, so time will tell how his priorities have shifted in the lame-duck period.
So far, it’s been as if the pandemic simply no longer existed, putting prognosticators in the dark. The president has instead been focusing on clinging to power, suffering blow after legal blow in his bid to litigate and overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Mr Trump spent nearly all 40 minutes of his first public, one-on-one interview since the election spouting a torrent of discredited and baseless conspiracy theories about a “rigged” and stolen election. He barely mentioned the road ahead on pandemic relief.
Congressional leaders are spending this week trying to figure out ways to bolt extensions to popular bipartisan programmes from the $2.2trn CARES Act from March onto the appropriations bill that must pass by 11 December to keep the government funded.
Those programmes include more money for the small business-oriented Paycheck Protection Program and extensions for rent and student debt payment moratoriums.
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