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Lame-duck session

With the Republican sweep in the election, the sense is
the lame-duck legislative agenda will be minimalist, with
Republicans having little motivation to engage in other
business aside from funding the government beyond
December 9. Congress returns the week of November 14
for organizational meetings and then departs again for
Thanksgiving week, leaving lawmakers only a couple of
weeks to finish their legislative business. Other
possibilities include: a defense authorization bill; the
conference report for an omnibus energy bill; the “21st
Century Cures” bill increasing funds for medical research
and accelerating drug approvals; the Water Resources
Development Act (WRDA), which would also carry money
to address the drinking-water crisis in Flint, Michigan; tax
extenders provisions; and retirement savings measures.

Government Funding. Under the stopgap continuing
resolution (CR) cleared on September 28, funding for the
government will expire on December 9. Only one of the
12 fiscal 2017 appropriations bills has been sent to the
President so far. The government funding bill may take
the form of a large omnibus bill or continuing resolution,
if the House and Senate Republican leadership’s
preference for moving spending bills on a standalone
basis or in packages does not pan out. Given the election
results, leaders are likely to limit the length of the
spending bill to a handful of months to allow the Trump
administration an opportunity to help shape fiscal 2017
spending next year. Speaker Ryan has said he favors a
strategy of combining spending bills into “minibus”
vehicles, but Senate Democrats have said such an
approach could be a tactic to get around the spending
caps Congress agreed to on a bipartisan basis last year.
The bill(s) may include additional spending to address
flooding in Louisiana and elsewhere, and damage from
Hurricane Matthew. If the vehicle for government funding
is a large omnibus bill, Republicans may push for some
conservative policy “riders” as their price for accepting
the budget numbers that were negotiated last year.

Tax. There are no must-passtax issues for the lame-duck
session, and it is unclear whether there will be
consideration of expiring tax provisions, House and
Senate miscellaneous tax bills, and tax technical
corrections. House Ways and Means Chairman Brady is
opposed to addressing tax extender provisions this year,
preferring to look forward to tax reform; that could also
be the position taken on other tax issues given that
Republicans will control Washington and have a shared
interest in tax reform. However, Senate Leader McConnell
previously committed to addressing energy tax extenders
this year, so they could still come up for consideration.

EY

Pensions. The Senate could consider the Retirement
Enhancement and Savings Act, a package of measures
affecting multiple-employer pension plans, 401(k) plans
and annuities, which was approved on a unanimous vote
by the Senate Finance Committee on September 21. The
committee also approved the Miners Protection Act, which
would fund retiree health and pension benefits for coal
miners, which a majority of the committee’s Republican
members opposed.

Health. One of the top Republican legislative priorities for
the lame-duck session is the 21st Century Cures bill, a
package of measures intended to spur new medical
treatments and boost funding for the National Institutes of
Health, the FDA, and White House initiatives such as
“precision medicine” and the Cancer Moonshot. Questions
remain in both the House and Senate over how to pay for
the bill and the size of the funding increases, but Senator
McConnell has said the bill “could end up being the most
significant piece of legislation we pass in the whole
Congress.”

On the House side, this continues to be the top priority of
the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee
Fred Upton. Leaders of the Energy and Commerce
Committee said on September 29 that they had been
“working hard for months, and we will continue to work
toward an agreement that can pass both chambers and be
signed by the President.” The House passed its version of
the 21st Century Cures bill (H.R. 6) in July 2015 by a vote
of 344-77, including nearly $9 billion in new research
funding for the NIH and reforms to the FDA’s process for
approving certain new medicines and medical devices. In
the Senate, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
(HELP) Committee has passed a package of 19 bills aimed
at accelerating approval of new drugs and medical devices
and attracting talented researchers to the FDA, but the full
Senate has yet to consider the bills. HELP Committee
Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) told Bloomberg BNA in
June that the impediments to passage are the proposals’
complexity and disagreements over how to pay for
them. Negotiations continue.

Speaker Ryan has also listed passage of mental health
legislation as one of his priorities for the lame-duck
session. H.R. 2646, a bill sponsored by Rep. Tim Murphy
(R-PA) that passed the House almost unanimously in July,
would expand Medicaid coverage of mental health
services, fund more psychiatric hospital beds and change
privacy rules to allow caregivers to receive more
information about patients.

11 | Election 2016

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