Congress has until midnight on Friday to pass their omnibus package, or we end up with another

shutdown. It's the shutdown standoff or the shutdown shuffle, as we like to call it, and every

year we tend to go through this exact same dance. Joining me right now is our ABC News correspondent

in Washington. Andy Field is with us, and Andy, always great to hear from you.

First of all, Merry Christmas, happy holidays.

I hope everything's going great with you and the fam.

And same with you and your listeners here.

Yeah, the government turns into a pumpkin at midnight on Friday. If we don't do something in that we use the royal we meaning Congress.

The Senate, two retiring senators, a Democrat and Republican, hammered out a deal that's a fairly good compromise that gives each side a little of what they wanted.

It's $1.7 trillion. There's no way you can

wrap your head around how much money that is. Trillion here, trillion there. Eventually, you're talking

about big money. A giant, giant number. And more than half of that is going to the military,

and you're probably going, wait a minute, didn't they just pass a military spending bill?

And I would say, yes, they did, but even that's not enough to get paid the military budget

because they added another $800 billion in this one.

In fact, it's more money than goes into all what they call the non-military discretionary spending for food stamps,

for child education, for college aid, for veterans help, for funding the Capitol Hill police,

for all the things that they actually need to do to make government run or to help people

at the lower ends of society not

starve to death. All that stuff's in there, too. The child tax credit that helps so many

middle income and lower income families get through the pandemic with enough money to pay for child care so they

could actually go to work, that's not in this bill. There are other big tax breaks that they

...