With a new budget measure in place, overall federal discretionary spending will rise modestly for the current fiscal year and the next one. Attention now will turn to the congressional appropriations committees, which soon will decide how to divide the newly approved additional funds. Construction programs will compete with hundreds of other federal programs for shares of the increased pie.
Appropriators will have to produce final fiscal 2016 line-item numbers by Dec. 11, when a stopgap spending measure expires.