When a team of three top Biden administration national security officials gave a private briefing to the House of Representatives on Oct. 11, they proposed working with Congress on emergency funding to tackle multiple foreign-policy crises at once: the Israel-Hamas war, the war in Ukraine, support for Taiwan, and the U.S. southern border.
In the past, such a proposal wouldn’t elicit much controversy. Even in the hyper-partisan House, support for Israel is virtually unanimous, while nearly all Democrats and most Republicans broadly agree on funding to back Ukraine and counter Russia and China. But when the administration officials brought up the idea of a joint supplemental funding package in the briefing, a group of Republicans responded by jeering them with a chorus of boos.
The exchange, described to Foreign Policy by one lawmaker in attendance and three congressional aides briefed on the matter, offers a glimpse into how the chaos in the Republican-controlled House is morphing from a domestic political circus into a massive foreign-policy headache for the Biden administration. How that chaos plays out could have major implications for the scale and timing of U.S. security assistance to Israel as well as the continued flow of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, seen as critical in its war against Russia.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby warned last week that Washington is “running out of runway” to send security assistance to Israel and Ukraine without additional funding from Congress—all stymied by the glaring absence of a House speaker amid unprecedented infighting among House Republicans. The Republicans are inching closer to naming Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump and skeptic of U.S. support for Ukraine, to be speaker, but he still faces an uphill battle to scrape together enough votes from the Republican caucus to get the job.
“The sooner that there’s a speaker of the House, obviously, the more comfortable we’ll all be in terms of being able to support Israel and Ukraine right now,” Kirby said. “Because of existing appropriations and existing authorities, we’ve been OK. But that’s not going to last forever.”
The House has been mired in dysfunction ever since a fringe group of Republicans ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his job two weeks ago, with no succession plan in mind. Republicans are in the midst of a mini-civil war politically over how to climb out of the mess.
The first question is: Who will the next House speaker be? Under current rules, the House is extremely limited in what it can do without a confirmed speaker. At this point, the House can’t even pass a resolution voicing support for Israel after the Hamas terrorist attacks that has support from more than 400 of its 433 members, let alone pass complex security assistance funding packages. (There are currently two vacancies in the House.)
While nearly all Republicans and Democrats will back funding for new security assistance packages to Israel, Ukraine is more complicated. A coterie of the GOP House opposes further aid to Ukraine, with some arguing the United States has given the eastern European country enough, and with at least one, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, parroting Russian talking points on the origins of the conflict. If Ukraine becomes more politicized on the right, more members could follow suit and begin opposing—or, at the very least, not proactively supporting—Ukraine aid. Those dynamics matter when the Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House.
Jordan, a longtime budget hawk who has championed Trump’s falsehoods about the results of the 2020 election, has emerged as the only front-runner who may actually net enough votes to be speaker. Jordan still has to sway dozens of Republicans to his cause, including foreign-policy hawks and centrists who are skeptical of his leadership credentials. Since the Democrats will not vote for him, Jordan needs to convince 217 of the 221 Republicans in the House to back him to be elected, leaving little margin for any dissent.
The second question is whether defense hawks can use the House speakership race to their advantage to clinch gains for national security funding, including on Ukraine.
Jordan notched some significant wins on Monday when two prominent Ukraine supporters endorsed him. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Ken Calvert, who leads the powerful defense subcommittee on appropriations, both threw their weight behind Jordan. Those endorsements may signal that Jordan is willing to make deals on keeping U.S. military aid to Ukraine flowing, though neither Rogers nor Calvert explicitly said so in their statements.
The third question is what happens to future funding packages—known as supplementals—for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and border security. Three administration officials confirmed that the Biden administration wants to bundle funding together into one big package to pass both the House and the Senate—though the administration has yet to unveil the specifics of this plan. The package the administration is drafting could be presented to Congress as soon as the end of this week, these officials said. Democrats endorse the strategy of bundling these four national security measures into one supplemental, as do some prominent Republican lawmakers such as Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Nearly all Republicans endorse boosting funding for Israel, which has outsized significance in American politics, and for Taiwan, to counter China. Nearly all Republicans also want to pressure the Biden administration to spend more on border security. The hitch is Ukraine, where a sliver of the slim Republican majority can derail funding. Democrats, as well as some centrist Republicans, figure that linking all the funding together would make it all but impossible to block more money for Ukraine. Not all Republicans, including Ukraine supporters like Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, are sold on that plan, however.
The next big question is what those aid packages will contain. The Senate, fed up with the chaos in the House, is rushing to draft its own supplemental aid package for Israel and potentially Ukraine without waiting for the dust to settle in the House. Any final bill would ultimately have to pass both the House and Senate. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee separately has scheduled confirmation hearings this week for President Joe Biden’s picks to be ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and ambassador to Egypt, Herro Mustafa Garg, as the crisis highlighted the growing backlog of national security nominees in limbo.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer traveled to Israel over the weekend and said he discussed what a U.S. aid package to Israel would entail. Among the Israeli wish list that Schumer outlined is replenishing stocks for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, precision-guided bombs, and 155 mm mortar shells.
So far, the White House and Senate leadership have been quiet on what Ukraine might get. However, several Western defense officials familiar with the inner workings of U.S. military aid to Ukraine say a supplemental would likely include funding to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles as older weapons and artillery munitions are transferred to Ukraine, as well as training, upkeep, and maintenance for Ukrainians using and being trained on advanced U.S. weapons systems such as long-range artillery systems and M1 Abrams tanks.
Past supplementals for Ukraine have also funded salaries—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—for U.S. service members deployed in Europe to train Ukrainians and conduct more military exercises with NATO allies in a bid to deter Russia from expanding the war.
The political battles in Washington constitute an existential issue for Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During a visit to Washington in September, Schumer recounted to reporters how Zelensky summed up his dilemma to U.S. lawmakers: “Mr. Zelensky said, ‘If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war,’” Schumer said.
House Democrats, meanwhile—stuck on the sidelines while they wait for Republicans to elect their own replacement speaker—have made their frustrations clear.
“We have a war in Europe, a war in the Middle East, challenges around the world, tensions in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States is unable to elect a speaker of the House,” Democratic Rep. Andy Kim told Foreign Policy in an interview. “What kind of signal does that send to our adversaries and our competitors?”
