With national and swing state polls indicating support between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump is fairly even, casual political observers could be forgiven for not realizing that House and Senate races are also tight; there could even be a historic switch in the House and Senate majorities this November.
On March 11, President Joe Biden submitted his FY 2025 Proposed Budget to Congress. Unlike prior year budget proposals, this one is a setup for an unavoidable tax debate in 2025, when many of the tax provisions enacted during the Trump administration in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 will expire.
The quest to approve federal funding continued during another busy week in Washington, where lawmakers took up a $435 billion funding package that includes the FDA and a number of other departments. Also this week, 16 states and American Samoa held presidential primary elections, with 854 Republican and 1,420 Democratic delegates at stake.
Last week, hundreds of NAIOP members from the U.S. and Canada attended NAIOP’s Chapter Leadership and Legislative Retreat (CL&LR) in Washington, D.C., with the conference culminating in countless meetings with their elected representatives to advocate on behalf of the commercial real estate industry.
In any year with divided government, it is a challenge to achieve agreements on appropriations and tax policy, but this Congress is also faced with challenges of reaching agreements on border security, along with assistance to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine. Margins in both the House and the Senate are narrow and the presidential election year shortens the legislative timeline before congressional re-election campaigns start in earnest.
As 2023 comes to a close and we look ahead to the challenges facing commercial real estate in 2024, it is clear that persistent advocacy on the public policy front will be more important than ever to ensure that the interests of NAIOP members are protected. This is true of course at the state and local level, but it is at the federal level, where government gridlock has been most on display, that maintaining our strong advocacy will be critical.
For the first December in recent years, Congress is no longer facing a government shutdown deadline. Prior to the Thanksgiving recess, Congress approved a two-tiered appropriations package. This “laddered” approach primarily funds domestic programs (such as housing, agriculture, transportation and infrastructure) until Jan. 19, 2024, and the remaining programs, including defense and homeland security, until Feb. 2, 2024. Year-end 2023 is not without its share of must-pass legislation, however.
Following three weeks of negotiations and squabbling, House Republicans elected Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson to serve as the 56th Speaker of the House. This was a difficult time for House Republicans, who struggled to find a new speaker after eight of their members joined all House Democrats to abruptly oust McCarthy on Oct. 3.
On Tuesday, Kevin McCarthy became the first speaker in the history of the United States to be removed from his office when eight Republicans, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, and all 208 Democrats present in the House voted to support the motion to vacate. The final vote was 216- 210.
While fighting in Congress over spending bills is nothing new, the heated politics surrounding this year’s federal government funding battle, and the resulting animosity if a government shutdown does materialize, could linger well beyond October and make reaching agreement on a tax bill all the more challenging.
