Why the White House is letting McCarthy flail

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is struggling to pass a bill to fund the government — and the White House isn’t about to throw him a lifeline.

With just days to go before the government runs out of money, Biden’s team is watching Congress steam toward a shutdown, resigned to the reality that there’s little they can do now to fix the situation and confident the politics will play out their way.

President Joe Biden has steered well clear of the chaos engulfing the House, where Republicans are battling each other over a government funding bill. Within the White House, aides have settled on a hard-line strategy aimed at pressuring McCarthy to stick to a spending deal he struck with Biden back in May rather than attempt to patch together a new bipartisan bill.

“We agreed to the budget deal and a deal is a deal — House GOP should abide by it,” said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private calculations. Their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.”

Biden world’s wait-and-see approach comes against the backdrop of an increasingly likely shutdown, which would be the first of the Biden era.

On Tuesday, GOP leadership canceled plans for a procedural vote on a short term funding bill, wary it had the numbers to pass. Hours later, hard-right conservatives tanked a procedural vote related to a defense spending bill. Moderate House Democrats have been working on a last-ditch fall back option to avert a shutdown, but any final product will need approval from the Senate.

For now, the White House is staying out of the mix, trying instead to draw a contrast between the House majority that can’t complete the task of keeping the government’s lights on and Biden, who on Tuesday addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It’s also highlighting the price of the latest GOP plan, such as, in their estimation, cutting 800 Customs and Border Protection agents and 110,000 Head Start positions for children.

The administration has hitched its wagon to a Senate effort widely supported by members of both parties in that chamber. The top Republican and Democratic appropriators are working on long-term, bipartisan funding bills that adhere to the agreed upon spending levels, although they have accepted that a stop-gap funding bill will be needed. There is a sense in the White House and on Capitol Hill that support for the Senate bill would increase if it becomes evident that McCarthy can’t steer his conference.

Getting involved now, White House officials reasoned, would only lend credibility to an attempt by conservative lawmakers to effectively rip up the Biden-McCarthy deal agreed to during debt ceiling talks in the spring and extract deeper cuts from the administration. It also would risk further angering progressives, who already didn’t like the funding levels in that spring agreement.

“The White House is there. The House Democrats are there, and the Senate Democrats and Republicans,” said Rep. Rosa Delauro (D-Conn.), the Democrats’ top appropriator. “It’s just this recalcitrant group of House Republicans.”

The administration is not entirely hands off, though. Senior administration officials, chiefly OMB Director Shalanda Young, have been in touch with lawmakers in both chambers and parties.