Friday, December 11, 2020 Tick Tock. The clock is ticking and the 116th Congress has three big tasks in its waning days: ensure the federal government does not shut down due to a lack of funding, pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and get an economic stimulus package on the president’s desk. With regard to government funding and economic stimulus, as of now, the plan appears to punt those items to next week (via a one-week continuing resolution) and then roll them together into one legislative vehicle (though even this strategy appears perilous, because there is no such agreement yet at the time of this writing). While this strategy buys legislators time, it isn’t as if they have been making much headway, particularly with regard to an economic stimulus bill. Indeed, the negotiations this week have resulted in almost no substantive progress from our report last week, and the status of negotiations on all three bills appears to be getting worse, not better.