President Joe Biden signed a stopgap funding bill on Friday that will keep the government open into next year, as lawmakers continue work on the Fiscal Year 2022 appropriations bills.
The House and Senate on Thursday each passed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through Feb. 18, 2022. The legislation is the second CR for FY 2022. The CR the government is currently operating under expires at midnight tonight.
The Navy in a Friday statement said it is evaluating how the new CR will affect the service.
“The budget submission for FY22 reflects the money needed for the Navy to continue readiness for today, modernization for tomorrow, and investment in the future to build an integrated all-domain fleet to compete, deter, and win,” Navy spokeswoman Lt. Katie Diener told USNI News in a statement.
“The Navy is assessing the impacts of the recently passed legislation. The longer the continuing resolution lasts, the greater the impact on Navy programs and our people. We need predictable and stable funding to ensure we can continue to support our readiness and we remain hopeful that the FY22 defense bills are passed prior to the end of the Continuing Resolution.”
The Navy did not immediately respond to a question as to whether it sent anomalies, or waivers, to Capitol Hill. For the last stopgap spending bill that is about to expire the service did not have any “approved anomalies,” USNI News previously reported.
Under a CR, the Pentagon’s funding is limited to the previous fiscal year’s levels and the Defense Department cannot spend money on new-start programs.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro in October said that the service could manage under the nine-week CR, but an extension past Dec. 3 would lead to “catastrophic results.”
“A continuing resolution for three months is … something that we have to be able to manage. We have lived with continuing resolutions for quite a few years now. So it just doesn’t come as much of a shock or surprise anymore as perhaps it used to,” Del Toro said in a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy at the time.
“Having said that, though, continuing resolutions have real negative consequences. While we may be able to survive a three-month continuing resolution, once you start looking at a six month or a year-long continuing resolution, the results are really disastrous, because especially when it comes to the readiness of our forces, right, the ability of our forces to be able to meet the missions they have to meet today around the globe in a real, credible way.”
