The U.S. Capitol is seen on July 13, 2023. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)

WASHINGTON — A prolonged leadership void in the House could have negative repercussions for the military, increasing the likelihood of a government shutdown that would leave troops without pay and jeopardizing critical weapons support for Ukraine, defense experts say.

The historic ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., from the speakership this week plunged the House into a state of paralysis that will extend to the Defense Department if a new speaker is not selected quickly, said William Galston, a senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a center-left leaning Washington think tank.

“The defense of the United States is on autopilot,” he said.

House Republicans are expected to begin deliberations about who will take over as speaker next week. If voting requires multiple ballots, as was the case with McCarthy in January, the process could take days. Congress faces a mid-November deadline for passing spending bills and avoiding a government shutdown.

“We now find ourselves in a dangerous situation,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “Until Republicans stop their infighting, the House can vote on no bills. No appropriations work can get done. If, God forbid, some national crisis were to occur that demands immediate action, the House would be unable to quickly respond.”

For now, the most urgent matter demanding lawmaker attention is military aid for Ukraine as it presses a counteroffensive against Russian forces, Galston said. The Pentagon has repeatedly warned Congress in recent days that it has exhausted nearly all available security assistance funding for Ukraine.

“This is a pretty critical time,” Galston said. “It’s a terrible time to have any interruption or threat of interruption of military resources, not to mention the kind of financial support that the [Ukrainian] government needs to keep operating.”

An increasingly vocal Republican faction in the House is against continued assistance for Ukraine and their opposition has held up a $24 billion aid package requested by the White House in August. The aid is in limbo without a House speaker but its fate also hinges on who ultimately occupies the speaker position, experts said.

One candidate for the speakership, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., has supported aid to Ukraine while another, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has opposed it.

A speaker critical of Ukraine aid could still be persuaded to put it to a vote if most House members support it or the assistance is paired with a Republican priority such as immigration reform, said Travis Sharp, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank with senior staff who worked for the Defense Department.

Galston said House members could also override the speaker through a procedural maneuver called a discharge petition, which would allow them to bring a bill to the floor without the speaker’s blessing. The petition requires 218 signatures. Most members of the House — 311 lawmakers — voted in favor of a program last week that arms and trains Ukrainians.

There is much less bipartisan consensus for an appropriations bill that would fund the Pentagon for the next year. House Republicans last month narrowly approved the spending bill after adding contentious provisions targeting abortion access, diversity initiatives and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s salary.

The House needs to reconcile its partisan version of the legislation with the Senate’s spending proposal if Congress wants to avoid a government shutdown without passing a short-term funding bill by Nov. 17. The Democrat-led Senate has yet to pass any of its appropriations bills.

“Even if a new speaker is selected relatively quickly, there is a wide gulf between the appropriations bills that the House Republicans are prepared to accept and the bills that a bipartisan coalition in the Senate will accept,” Galston said.

A similar gap exists between the House and Senate versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual, must-pass policy bill for the Pentagon. The House version contains controversial conservative riders while the Senate version sidesteps them.

Work on the NDAA should not be affected by the turmoil in House leadership, at least for now, said Sharp, who is a Navy Reserve officer. The bill is typically passed by the end of December.

“Relative to the appropriations side, the NDAA still gets managed by the Armed Services committees in a way that protects the NDAA from being as wrapped up in some of these bigger political battles,” he said.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said this week that negotiations with his House counterparts will keep moving despite the disarray in the lower chamber.

Still, the extent of the discord within the House Republican ranks, where a vocal hard-right minority wields outsized influence, could eventually endanger the bipartisanship that has long been a hallmark of the NDAA, Sharp said.

“The risk is that there is a spillover of all this political bad blood and then the NDAA becomes just another battleground for all the fighting going on over the overall budget, over the speakership,” he said. “The Armed Services committees are going to be working hard to defend their bill but they can’t stop individual lawmakers from using it as a vehicle to advance their ideas.”

The injection of right-wing proposals into the House version of the NDAA was one of the reasons that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., urged his caucus to vote for McCarthy’s removal on Tuesday.

Galston said the downfall of McCarthy and the fight to replace him adds yet another complication for a Defense Department already contending with the ongoing hold of more than 300 senior military nominees in the Senate.

“It must be a period of very great uncertainty and anxiety over at the Pentagon,” he said.