House Republicans announced a spending bill to keep government agencies open through Sept. 30, daring Democrats to vote against it and risk a disruptive March 15 shutdown.

The move tees up a dramatic confrontation on Capitol Hill next week and threatens to further fuel uncertainty for a federal workforce roiled by swift and aggressive cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk. 

Speaker Mike Johnson will attempt to hold the fractious Republican majority together and muscle the 99-page bill through the House on Tuesday, likely without help from Democrats. But the bill would still need the help of moderate Democrats in the Senate, where the legislation would stall without 60 votes. 

Neither party, however, has shown an appetite for a shutdown. If the bill fails in either chamber, Congress is likely to pass a temporary bill to buy additional time to forge a compromise that has eluded lawmakers since the fiscal year began in October.  

President Donald Trump called on Republican lawmakers to pass the bill next week, warning them to allow “NO DISSENT” in their ranks.  

“I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order,” Trump said on his Truth Social network.

Democrats have tried to leverage the spending bill to put constraints on Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Republicans, who hold the majority in both chambers, have resisted. The stopgap bill was crafted in consultation with the White House. 

The stopgap bill would allow the Trump administration “to continue the DOGE efforts finding all these extraordinary levels of savings, and waste, fraud and abuse,” Johnson told Fox News on Friday. “We’ll be able to incorporate that into the budgeting for FY 26 which will start almost immediately after we’re done next week.”

Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said she opposed the bill because it would allow Musk to continue making cuts, overriding the will of Congress.

“By essentially closing the book on negotiations for full-year funding bills that help the middle class and protect our national security, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have handed their power to an unelected billionaire,” she said in a statement.

The bill would slightly decrease overall discretionary spending through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The bill, Trump signaled in remarks earlier this week, paves the way for his more sweeping legislative priorities: a proposed $4.5 trillion tax cut over the next decade paired with $2 trillion in spending cuts aimed at entitlement programs.

“Conservatives will love this Bill because it sets us up to cut Taxes and Spending in reconciliation, all while effectively FREEZING Spending this year,” Trump said on Truth Social Wednesday as the bill was being drafted. “Let’s get this Bill done.”

South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Fox News Sunday that while he didn’t want the government to shut down, the bill “is terrible on defense and the border. I want to commit what we’re going to have more money for border and defense before I vote for” it. 

The vote will test whether Johnson and Trump can wrangle GOP conservatives who have never voted for a stopgap funding measure. Conservative hard-liners have pledged to seek deep, permanent cuts to federal agencies in fiscal 2026 once Musk’s cost-cutting crusade is complete. 

The GOP cannot afford much opposition, given the narrow House majority. Already conservative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes stopgap bills without automatic spending cuts, has said he will vote against it. The bill contains new funding to boost immigration enforcement that the White House requested. 

The bill extends a host of expiring health programs from April 1 to Sept. 30, including Medicare coverage of telehealth consultations with doctors and funding for community health centers.

Republican leaders have already wooed defense hawks in the party worried about a freeze on Pentagon spending. They’re planning to use a separate GOP-only tax cut package to add $100 billion in military spending.  

The stopgap bill would boost defense spending by $6 billion while cutting non-defense spending by $13 billion relative to current levels, resulting in an overall spending cut, according to a House Republican leader’s aide. It contains no lawmaker pet projects known as earmarks. 

Part of the defense boost goes toward a pay increase for military troops authorized by Congress last year. 

The bill goes into detail on which weapons systems account should be newly funded. Top Senate Republican appropriator Susan Collins told reporters she doesn’t support giving the Pentagon a blank check to decide which contracts to initiate.

Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers and other hawks also secured flexibility for the Pentagon in the bill to boost the military’s ability to make new weapons purchases, which would typically not be allowed under a continuing resolution. 

The bill would grant the Pentagon the ability to transfer money into new accounts. The flexibility could allow for spending on new Virginia-class submarines and ships built by General Dynamics Corp.’s Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding.

Democrats are lining up to oppose the stopgap measure because it would freeze spending. The bill would also claw back $20.2 billion in spending for the Internal Revenue Service passed as part of President Joe Biden’s signature green-energy Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats say that is a poison pill that they cannot support because it would boost tax cheating by the wealthy. 

Democrats said a spending freeze effectively cuts crucial benefits.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter the Republican measure “threatens to cut funding for health care, nutritional assistance and veterans benefits through the end of the current fiscal year. That is not acceptable.” 

The minority party prefers a short-term bill to avoid a shutdown at the end of next week in order to allow talks to continue on detailed appropriations bills allowing 1% growth to defense and non-defense spending. The stopgap bill is below 1% spending cap increases approved in a bipartisan 2023 bill. 

A House Republican aide said the bill has increases for veterans benefits, housing assistance and fully funds food assistance for women and children. 

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This is a strange topic to bring up during tax season, but it is as good a time as any to take stock of your practice and your long-term goals. This is a two and a half-minute read and hopefully you will read it a couple of times, and then will dedicate some serious thinking about it after tax season when you are more relaxed.

Reason 1: You do not want to grow. This is a personal decision and, if that is your decision, then there is nothing wrong with it and you shouldn’t obsess over it. Do what is necessary to maintain your practice as it is now so it will continue that way as long as you want to keep working.

Reason 2: You do not delegate delegable decisions. That means you are not using leverage to pass on every task that can be done by someone else. You tend to want to make every decision. In many cases it is important for you to make the decision, but it cannot be so in every case. Delegate more. Part of growing is for your staff to also grow. That growth comes when they are empowered to take charge, supervise and make decisions. I can pretty much guarantee that some of those decisions will be wrong, so do not delegate decisions that could put a client, or you, out of business. Everything short of that can be handled when a wrong decision is made. That is part of growing. Think of a baby learning to walk and the many times they fall until they finally do not fall. What is that smile worth?

Reason 3: You run your firm as if it were a CPA practice and not a business. You are in a business that happens to perform professional accounting services. You are first a business owner and manager and second, a CPA. If you could not succeed in your own practice, you would still find work as a CPA, but it would just be in someone else’s practice. Being in business means you have the ultimate responsibility for everything that happens in your business. This also means you need to control it, oversee the quality, handle the hiring, perform the marketing, manage your customers, and get regular financial reports and daily key performance indicators to help you manage better. You also need to strategize and plan the growth. A hint on how to perform your ownership functions is to do what you would tell yourself to do if you were your client. Work, manage and lead as an owner.

Reason 4: Evaluate everything you do with a long-term view. You are not in business to get tax returns out the door, but to provide professional services to people who rely on you and pay you for that. Short-term fixes do not provide long-term benefits, processes, procedures and duplicable practices in repetitive functions. I know many accountants who start every year and every tax season where they left off last year. That is not growth and not working off of a sustainable business model. Serious reflection should be made over every part of your practice. You can identify most of the important issues and then pick the more serious ones, or the most serious, and start with those. Spending time trying to improve, streamline or fix the most serious issue confronting your growth ain’t such a bad idea.

Reason 5: Insufficient cash flow. Continuously being short of cash thwarts clear thinking about growth or anything not directly related to getting the cash to pay the payroll and other bills. The cash flow needs to be worked out. I recently wrote a column on how to deal with this. If this is a problem, concentrate on getting this worked out so you will have a clear head to develop a clear direction. Tax season is a great time to get this done — consider an extra increase for every tax return you are working on right now. Delaying or denying this will delay or deny your growth.

This is a good short list with some takeaways that could be implemented pretty quickly. There are many other reasons and things you could do, but any of the above is a good start.

Do not hesitate to contact me at emendlowitz@withum.com with your practice management questions or about engagements you might not be able to perform.

A UBS Group AG unit was found guilty by a French court of harassing two whistleblowers who lifted the lid on the bank’s efforts to help wealthy locals dodge taxes.

UBS France — as the unit was known during the investigation — retaliated against its former auditor Nicolas Forissier by sidelining him and refusing to promote him to executive director after he disclosed information to bosses within the company, the Paris criminal court ruled on Monday. 

“UBS was trying to bully its employee,” the lead Paris judge said. The court also found the bank guilty of penalizing another whistleblower, Stéphanie Gibaud, who helped French authorities spy on clients at an event organized around the 2011 Roland-Garros tennis tournament.

UBS Europe, which took over from the unit, was fined €75,000 ($81,300) — the maximum allowed by law at the time of the wrongdoing. The court also granted Forissier €50,000 in damages.

The harassment case is an offshoot of a wider legal saga in France that has been going on for more than 15 years. It culminated in a money laundering conviction for the Swiss bank as part of a prosecution effort that stemmed in part from the Forissier report.

That separate case isn’t entirely finished after France’s top court said in 2023 that a €1.8 billion penalty UBS had received should be reexamined, opening the door to a possible cut.

UBS said in a statement that it disagrees with the conviction, which it finds “unjust.” The Swiss bank said it will “analyze the decision and decide on next steps.”