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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 “21% 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 fiscal2017 appropriations bills has been sent to the President so far. The government funding bill may take the form of alarge 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 monthsto 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 alarge 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-pass tax 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. 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 benefitsfor 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 21° 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 continuesto 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 21% 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. EY 11 | Election 2016 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022383