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Donald Trump Signs Spending Bill After Threatening to Veto It
The $1.3 trillion measure passed Congress this week
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Friday signed a sweeping $1.3 trillion bill funding the U.S. government until October, hours after threatening to veto it over dissatisfaction with its immigration provisions.
The bill passed the House on Thursday and the Senate early Friday. Most lawmakers then left Washington for a two-week recess, operating under the assumption that he would sign the bill before the government’s funding expires at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
“As a matter of a national security, I’ve signed this omnibus budget bill,” Mr. Trump said, before quickly adding that there were “a lot of things I’m unhappy about in this bill.”
Mr. Trump criticized Congress for passing the spending package without leaving enough time to read the plan before funding expires at the end of the day.
“I say to Congress—I will never sign another bill like this again,” Mr. Trump said.
In a tweet earlier Friday, Mr. Trump cited his unhappiness with the amount of funding for his proposed wall on the border with Mexico, and he faulted Democrats for the fact that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which former President Barack Obama established and which the president ended last year, wasn’t addressed.
“I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
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During protracted negotiations in recent months, Mr. Trump rejected offers by Democrats to pair $25 billion for a border wall and related expenses with a path to citizenship for people eligible for the DACA program. Protecting the young immigrants was a Democratic priority, but the party’s lawmakers have been unwilling to accede to Trump demands for other changes in the immigration system.
With no agreement reached, the $1.3 trillion spending bill passed by the House on Thursday and the Senate early Friday morning didn’t include an extension of DACA. The Obama-era program shielded from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the country at a young age, often called Dreamers, and allows them temporarily to work legally in the U.S.
When Mr. Trump ended the program in September, he gave Congress until March 5 to pass a replacement before large numbers of people lost protections. But a federal court has ordered that the administration continue the program for now, and the Supreme Court has declined to expedite its hearing of the government’s appeal, lessening the urgency for lawmakers to agree on a fix.
Lawmakers from both parties on Friday urged Mr. Trump to drop his veto threat and sign the bill, the product of weeks of intense bipartisan negotiations.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate GOP whip, noted in a tweet to Mr. Trump that the spending bill’s benefits “to national security, border security, opioid crisis, infrastructure, school safety and fixing gun background check system are important and will save lives.”
“Pres. Trump needs to drop his wildly reckless veto threats and sign the #Omnibus bill right now,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) said in a tweet Friday. “Americans deserve leadership from the White House, not more self-inflicted chaos.”
But some conservatives cheered Mr. Trump on, encouraging him to abandon a bill they said provided too little funding for the border wall and too much funding for the rest of the government.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, had also opposed the spending bill because it didn’t include an extension of the DACA program.
“I could not support the government funding bill because it fails to address the uncertainty and fear Dreamers live with every day,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) said in a statement Friday morning. “President Trump unilaterally rescinded DACA and has since rejected every single bipartisan proposal that would solve the problem he created.”
The spending bill includes $1.57 billion for construction of physical barriers on the border with Mexico and other security measures. Mr. Trump won funding for 33 miles of new fencing on the Texas border—about half of what he requested. He also got funding for 60 miles of replacement or secondary fencing. That was more than Mr. Trump asked for but is also far less controversial.
“It does a lot of what we wanted,” Mr. Mulvaney said Thursday.
Democrats won a number of concessions in the spending bill, particularly regarding immigration enforcement inside the U.S. The bill also specified that the new border construction must use designs now in use, which rules out a solid concrete wall.
Some conservatives, upset that the bill didn’t include more funding for the wall, had urged Mr. Trump earlier in the week to veto the bill. Mr. Ryan on Thursday defended the bill’s border-security funding, saying it gave Mr. Trump a “down payment” on building the wall.