The policies being advanced this year are similarly dead on arrival. But in the interim, ahead of a September funding deadline and the November elections, House G.O.P. leaders are again loading the spending bills with hard-right measures in an effort to delight their ultraconservative core supporters and placate the most conservative members of their conference.
In the next few days, with lawmakers scheduled to consider spending bills to fund the Pentagon, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security, Republicans plan to force votes on proposals including reducing to $1 the salaries of Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, and cut off pay entirely for Antony Blinken, the secretary of state; cut funding for Mr. Mayorkas’s office by $10 million; and prohibit U.S. funding for Ukraine, including the use of taxpayer money to greenlight arms sales to Kyiv.
Already baked into the bills are a series of conservative social policy dictates, including measures that would bar the Pentagon from using any funds to promote critical race theory or to allow drag queen story hours on military bases, and would prohibit agencies from enforcing a slew of executive orders related to climate change issued by President Biden. The bills also prohibit agencies from allowing federal employees to take paid leave to obtain an abortion.
Some Republican lawmakers are seeking to go even further. Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana this week announced that he would try to add a provision to the military spending bill to strip money for in vitro fertilization treatment, which he said was “responsible for the destruction of life.”
