House sends $1.3 trillion spending bill to Senate as Friday deadline looms

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives approved a $1.3 trillion spending bill on Thursday to fund federal agencies and avert a government shutdown ahead of a midnight Friday deadline, sending it to the Senate despite a revolt by fiscal conservatives worried by what they called runaway spending.

The Republican-led House backed the measure 256-167, but 90 of the 238 House Republicans ignored pleas for support from House Speaker Paul Ryan and voted against it.

Coupled with recently enacted tax cuts, the bill to fund the government through Sept. 30 is projected to lead to budget deficits of more than $800 billion for this year. Conservatives balked and warned it could create problems for Republicans running for re-election in November.

"This omnibus doesn’t just forget the promises we made to voters - it flatly rejects them," Representative Mark Meadows, head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said after the vote. "This is wrong. This is not the limited government conservatism our voters demand."

The Senate, controlled by Republicans but with a narrow majority, is expected to vote late on Thursday or Friday. The White House said President Donald Trump will sign the bill, which significantly boosts defense funding but scales back spending requests on some of his other priorities.

"I’m confident it will pass the Senate by a comfortable margin," Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told reporters.

Passage of the bill would end several months of intense bickering between Republicans and Democrats over spending priorities, which led to two short government shutdowns earlier this year.

SCALED-BACK TRUMP PROPOSALS

It also would include setbacks for Trump, who did not receive all of the funding he sought in the negotiations for his long-promised wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, and whose proposals for severe cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, State Department and other federal agencies would also be scaled back.

Democrats complained that in the rush to pass the bill, few if any lawmakers had time to read through the 2,232-page tome to see what it actually contained. The bill was unveiled late on Wednesday.

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters the White House did not get everything it wanted in the massive spending package but the president planned to support it.

"It does a lot of what we wanted – not everything we wanted – but a lot of what we wanted on immigration," he told reporters.

Trump said on Twitter the bill will allow him to start building the wall, which he calls an essential part of efforts to reduce illegal immigration. "Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming," he wrote.

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But Democrats, who have long opposed the wall, argued the added funds will help build or restore a range of other barriers, including existing fencing, but not a concrete edifice.

Trump's original assertion that Mexico would finance the wall has been met with solid resistance by the Mexican government. In the budget negotiations at home, he at one stage wanted $25 billion included to fully fund construction of the wall, but negotiations with Democrats on that point fell apart early this week, according to congressional aides.

Instead, Trump would get nearly $1.6 billion more for border security this year. More border patrol agents could be hired, but there would not be a significant increase in immigration agents working the interior of the country.

The Department of Homeland Security had sought a big buildup in those officers to boost deportation of undocumented immigrants.

FIGHTING RUSSIAN HACKING

Besides an $80 billion boost in military spending, the largest in 15 years, the measure includes new money for improvements to the country's infrastructure, and to counter Russian election hacking.

In response to public anger and frustration over mass shootings, including a Feb. 14 massacre at a Florida high school, the bill also contains modest improvements to background checks for gun sales and grants to help schools prevent gun violence.

These provisions were far short of steps many Democrats and gun control groups say are needed to prevent repeats of mass killings of school children, concert-goers, church worshipers and others.

A so-called "grain glitch" included in a tax law enacted at the end of last year would be repaired by the legislation.

Big grain buyers, such as Anheuser Busch Inbev NV (BR:ABI), Cargill Inc and the ethanol industry, have complained the glitch gives lucrative tax breaks to grain producers for selling to farming cooperatives, and a lesser break for selling to agriculture companies.

The bill will provide a $307 million increase above the administration's request for counter-intelligence efforts to fight Russian cyber attacks in 2018, when U.S. mid-term congressional elections will be held, and $380 million for grants to states to secure their election systems.

Among the spending increases for non-defense programs are substantial healthcare investments, including a $414 million increase for Alzheimer’s disease research, $40 million more for research on developing a universal flu vaccine and $17 million more for antibiotic-resistance bacteria research – all at the National Institutes of Health.