Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Punch Bowl News Readback podcast.

I'm your host, Max Cohen, and today I'm joined by our policy reporter and portal expert,

Samantha Handler.

Sammy, how you doing?

Good, Max. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you on the show. It was a very busy week this week in Appropriations World.

And you are one of our appropriations experts, along with Bres, to talk all things government funding.

I know this week was quite timely in terms of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Funding Bill,

where there was a lot of debates over the FBI, and also Jeffrey Epstein, right? So I'll just turn it over to you. What happened this

week in this subcommittee? And what does this mean for the appropriations process going forward?

Right. So the Senate Appropriations Committee, the full committee, was scheduled to meet Thursday morning for their first markup of the year.

That's kind of unusual in the sense that, you know, usually we would have some markups by now, but, you know, July is often when they do this sort of thing.

But they were heading into their first markup, and then suddenly on Wednesday, we start hearing that Senator Chris Van Hollen has some problems with the Commerce Justice Science Bill, CJS.

Like, okay, what's going on there?

And then, you know, it turns out that Wednesday night, Van Hollen did the unusual move of calling a subcommittee markup, which Senate appropriations

does not do those publicly. Usually it's kind of an informal on paper process, but Van

Holland called a public subcommittee markup because he wanted to talk about his concern about

this FBI headquarters issue, which I know you have covered really in-depthly and much longer than I have.

But he was upset that the Trump administration last week had announced that the new FBI headquarters

is going to be in Washington, D.C., whereas there had been an agreement with the Biden administration,

there had been some sort of competition, and the headquarters

was ending, was going to be in Greenbelt, Maryland. And Van Hollen wanted to make sure that that was

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