By Ana Radelat

Washington — The U.S. House today approved a $1.4 trillion spending package that would significantly boost defense spending in Connecticut and increase funding for a slew of social programs as well, including Head Start and child care programs.

The spending bill would provide a total of $738 billion in fiscal 2020 funding for the military and $632 billion for nondefense departments such as Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, increasing spending for both “guns and butter” and adding to the federal deficit.

The 2,300-page bill, the result of a bipartisan compromise between congressional appropriators, also changes federal policy.

It would, for the first time in decades, fund federal studies of gun violence, a provision sought by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, who is the chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the budgets of the Labor Department, the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.

By Mark Pazniokas and Keith M. Phaneuf

Gov. Ned Lamont and Democratic legislative leaders today united behind a transportation financing concept that would rely on trucks-only tolls.

It was a breakthrough for a governor whose own party had repeatedly frustrated his major first-year objective of modernizing Connecticut’s aging highways and commuter rail system.

Senate Democratic leaders, who had summarily dismissed Lamont’s two earlier proposals for tolls on all motor vehicles as politically unpalatable and rejected his characterization of transportation infrastructure as a crisis, endorsed the new approach.

And they insisted it should be refined and passed in special session, most likely in January.