WASHINGTON: The Senate has sent the $675 billion 2019 defense appropriations bill to a conference committee with five weeks to go before the start of the fiscal year on October 1st. That gives the Pentagon a fighting chance to get funded on time and avoid another of the stopgap Continuing Resolutions that have hamstrung federal programs almost every fall for 20 years.

So Thursday’s overwhelming Senate vote to pass the bill clears a major hurdle in getting the budget passed on time. But the House and Senate conferees still have to negotiate a final spending plan, which must win votes in the House and Senate before being signed by President Trump.

President Donald Trump has already signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Pentagon policy, but the NDDA but doesn’t move any money around, something the appropriations bill does — after each chamber gets one more kick at the tires.

And time is running short in the weeks running up to November’s mid-term elections. The House passed its own $675 billion defense appropriations bill in June, and will head back to town on Sept. 4, giving lawmakers a paltry 11 days in session before the deadline hits.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, who is leading the Senate Armed Services Committee in the absence of John McCain, — whose family announced today he was stopping treatment for his cancer — said he’s sure that the deadline will be met, since lawmakers want to avoid “the trauma that that would bring.” But of course Inhofe isn’t an appropriator.

Known unknowns abound. Not only do the House and Senate have little time to knock out final appropriations language and vote on it, but President Trump has signaled he wouldn’t be opposed to a government shutdown this fall, which would bring everything to a grinding halt.

But the Pentagon and defense hawks in Congress want to get this done, in part due to the fact that the 2019 bill is the last of a two-year spending deal that loosened strict Budget Control Act caps enforced by automatic across-the-board budget cuts called sequestration. But the BCA caps are slated to come back in 2020 unless further action is taken on the Hill.

So what does the current bill actually buy? Some of the highlights include

• $24 billion for the Navy to build 13 new ships, including two littoral combat ships the White House says is one too many.
• The Air Force will also be given the money to buy 89 F-35 joint strike fighters, an increase over the Pentagon’s request of 77.
• And the Air Force’s JSTARS aircraft would live another day under the bill. The service would also get $375 million to work on its Advanced Battle Management System, which is slated to eventually replace the aircraft.