By Jen DiMascio

At the beginning of the week, lawmakers planned to bring a war-funding bill to a vote and reconciling remaining differences in a bill to authorize funding for the Defense Department.

By yesterday, hopes for results were fizzling.

The House had passed the $50 billion bill for the Iraq war, but a final vote on the measure in the Senate was unlikely. Senate leadership said it planned to hold cloture votes on the $50 billion bridge fund and possibly a $70 billion version today, but neither are expected to pass.

A conference agreement on the defense authorization bill was certainly not going to happen before December, as it stalled Nov. 14 over the issue of hate crimes.

If a bill providing $50 billion in stopgap funding for the war does not pass, the Army can sustain its operations through mid-February, the Army’s secretary said yesterday.

“[Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates has instructed us to begin planning for that possibility,” Pete Geren said during a Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearing.

Since the president this week signed the defense appropriations bill, the service’s ability to use continuing resolution, providing $70 billion for the war in Iraq, has stopped, Geren said. Now it must fund the war using funds in the base year bill.

The Army burns through $6.6 billion per month in Iraq. For the whole of 2008, the Army has $27 billion it can apply to operations and maintenance, which could be transferred to fund the war. That amount would keep the service functioning in Iraq through the middle of February, Geren said.

After that point, the services would begin furloughing civilians at bases in the United States to provide more funds for the war.

Not having the money “will put a terrible burden on soldiers, on families on the institutional Army, our ability to train. Timely funding is absolutely essential,” Geren said. “An organization of our size cannot live effectively with unpredictable funding, and we need that supplemental passed soon or we’re going to have to start planning for the possibility that we’re not going to have it.”

The armed services committees have also been occupied this week with conference negotiations on the defense authorization bill, which stalled over a fight about the inclusion of hate crimes language in the Senate version of the bill.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee, is among the House Democrats opposed to adding the language because he said it puts both independent bills in jeopardy.

The defense bill is vitally important, Abercrombie said, because it sets the policies for the Defense Department that help lay out how the money appropriated actually gets spent.

Most of the defense aspects in the bill have been resolved, Abercrombie said, including allowing funds for the Joint Cargo Aircraft program to remain with the Army, pending further review.

The Senate had given control over the program led by L-3 Communications [LLL] to the Air Force, as it did one year ago.

JCA was one of four key issues in the air and land subcommittee, Abercrombie said. The other issues had to do with the Air Force’s authority to retire or replace aircraft. Both sides came to a middle ground on the issue of retirement of aircraft, but he did not provide further details.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” he said.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the terrorism and unconventional threats subcommittee, said he was pleased with the outcome of his subcommittee’s conference, because of its focus on special forces and the funding provided for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment.