Senate voted (and Obama signed) the Continuing
Budget Resolution overnight, refugee program comes up short, by Ann Corcoran 12/10/16
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.
Elections have consequences as
Congress defers to Trump’s wish to weigh in on the federal budget for a portion
of FY17. Funding=policy.
You can read about the final
vote here at The Hill. 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 signaling 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. Here is what Numbers USA is
reporting: Fri, Dec 9th
The House overwhelmingly approved,
with bipartisan support, a short-term spending bill yesterday without any
significant changes to the refugee program and without expanding the H-2B
guest-worker program.
The short-term spending bill would
fund the government through late-April, so there will likely be another battle
then. But negotiations will be with a different administration that’s more
focused on eliminating fraud within the refugee program and protecting the jobs
and wages of American workers.
We faced two threats with this
week’s fight. First,
back in September, Pres. Obama demanded an increase in funding for the refugee
program to accommodate an additional 25,000 refugees over last year’s already
inflated numbers.
The White House more recently requested a doubling of refugee funding
through the short-term spending bill. The money not only would pay for the
additional refugees, but would house and resettle across the U.S. the thousands
of border surgers who have illegally entered the U.S. in recent months.
Congress added a small increase in refugee funding, but none of the
additional funds can be used to resettle new refugees in the United States nor
can they be used by the Obama Administration to house and resettle the border
surgers.
The budget battle will now resume in
the spring—a battle which could be significantly less important for us if Trump
acts on his campaign promise to halt refugee admissions from terror-producing
countries—which is about half of the flow coming in right now.
This is strange…..
I searched around this morning to
see if the VOLAGs (refugee contractors) or their lobbyists were wailing, but am
not seeing anything. Delayed reaction? Maybe they had some leftover funds
sloshing around? But, they have already said they don’t!
Keep me posted if you see anything. What you might see
before I do is some local news reports that say that the opening of a new
resettlement site is being ‘delayed.’ This post and all posts on the
budget process are tagged ‘Where is Congress.’
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/senate-voted-and-obama-signed-the-continuing-budget-resolution-overnight-refugee-program-comes-up-short/
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