The federal government will continue to be funded mostly at the Fiscal Year 2016 level until late April. The budget extension had passed the House earlier in the week and the Senate voted last night to send the bill to Obama’s desk.
Many Dems were unhappy because instead of funding the government for the year—until September 30th—the whole issue will be revisited in the spring. The election of Donald Trump was pretty much the deciding factor and this short term fix gives the Trump team time to get in place and put their funding priorities in the mix.
For our purposes (we have been writing about the issue of funding for the Refugee program for months), the results are good news.
Last week we reported that the Obama Administration was looking for billions in additional funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement claiming that if they didn’t get their big tranche of money, ORR would go broke in February.
Well they didn’t get most of it which should make it even easier for Trump to stop or significantly slow the flow of refugees after January 20th since clearly the Congress is signalling that there is not much support for the high level of refugees that Obama wanted and surely Hillary would have enthusiastically supported had she won the election in November.
Obama’s 110,000 refugee goal for this year will now (in my opinion) be out of reach.
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/senate-voted-and-obama-signed-the-continuing-budget-resolution-overnight-refugee-program-comes-up-short/