�鶹Ů��

The Senate is preparing to vote on legislation that would keep the government open beyond next Wednesday's deadline at a price Democrats are certain to reject — stripping taxpayer money from Planned Parenthood. The stopgap spending bill is widely expected to fail Thursday. The next steps aren't set in stone, although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promised there won't be a government shutdown. That suggests he would soon press ahead with a stopgap measure that's free of the Planned Parenthood dispute. (9/24)

Rank-and-file Republican lawmakers are increasingly protesting the tactics of tea party colleagues who demand that legislation to keep the government open also take away federal funding for Planned Parenthood. The leading proponent of bringing the fight over funding the group to a possible government shutdown remained unbowed. (Taylor, 9/23)

Patients with critical illnesses will be turned away and research will be disrupted if the government shuts down again on Oct. 1, the director of the National Institutes of Health and the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee warned Tuesday. With just four legislative days remaining until the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said that during the 16-day shutdown in 2013, new patients were not allowed in to the clinical facilities of the Bethesda medical campus. (Bernstein, 9/22),

Permanently defunding Planned Parenthood would end up increasing government spending by $130 million over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, projects that defunding Planned Parenthood would actually end up increasing government spending, because it would result in more unplanned births as women lost access to services such as contraception. Medicaid would have to pay for some of those births, and some of the children themselves would then end up qualifying for Medicaid and other government programs. (Sullivan, 9/23)

Budget hawks in Congress may stand their ground on wasteful spending, but shutting down the government is no example of fiscal frugality. ... The reports run through a lengthy list of disruptions in 2013. They include a backlog in veterans’ disability claims, nearly 6,300 children left out of Head Start, patients left out of cancer studies at the National Institutes of Health, halted consumer-safety work, delays in tax refunds. The Food and Drug Administration delayed “nearly 500 food and feed domestic inspections and roughly 355 food safety inspections under state contracts,” the budget office said. (Rein, 9/24)