Here’s how Congress is supposed to fund the US government, but never does
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
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Needless to say, two billionaires who don’t currently hold elected office aren’t really supposed to be calling the shots for Congress, but that’s where Americans find themselves.
President-elect Donald Trump, who doesn’t take the oath of office for another month, helped kill a carefully crafted and bipartisan temporary spending bill after it came under harsh criticism from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected and is set to oversee government efficiency efforts next year – despite the billions his companies get in government contracts. Musk whipped up opposition to the spending bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Trump responded.
Read more about the spending bill they torpedoed by turning House Republicans against it for policy items and the first cost-of-living increase for federal lawmaker salaries since 2009.
How the government will be funded and continue functioning after a deadline this Friday will now be the subject of furious discussions. Democrats, who still barely control the Senate, will need to buy in. Republicans, who barely control the House, are likely to need help from House Democrats. And the current president, Joe Biden, will also need to sign the bill into law – and has been very quiet.
One might wonder, if a last-minute scramble is not the preferred method to fund the US government, what is? What’s below was originally published the last time we saw one of these spending dramas unfold, back in September.
OK, how are things supposed to work?
The Constitution requires that the government only spend money that comes through “appropriations made by law.” Laws must be passed by both the House and Senate and signed by the president. But we’re talking a lot of money – $1.7 trillion in annual discretionary spending in the 2023 fiscal year.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate divide up the funding of the government into 12 different appropriations bills. Committees in the House and Senate work to draft appropriations.
The full House and Senate are then supposed to consider these bills in turn, reconcile their differences and send the final product to the president. This work is supposed to be completed by September 30 since the government’s fiscal year begins on October 1. So they’re already months overdue for the 2025 fiscal year.
How many of these regular appropriations bills were passed into law this year?
Zero.
The House, to its credit, passed an initial version of half of the 12 appropriations bills. The Senate didn’t pass any, so none of the appropriations bills came anywhere close to being signed into law on time.
That doesn’t mean lawmakers didn’t do any work on the spending legislation. Appropriations committees in both the House and Senate did pass versions of all but one bill, and the versions passed in the Senate committees were all passed with some bipartisan support. Even if the appropriations bills don’t pass the full chamber, the work of these committees can ultimately be reflected in spending bills that do pass.
When was the last time Congress passed a single regular appropriations bill on time?
It’s been years.
Lawmakers haven’t passed a single appropriations bill on time and sent it to the president’s desk since 2019, when they sent five. That’s the same year of the most recent partial government shutdown, by the way.
The 2019 fiscal year was an anomaly. Lawmakers routinely fail to pass any appropriations bills at all. In the years leading up to 2019, lawmakers passed one single appropriations bill on time in 2017 and one in 2010.
In the decades before that, they would routinely pass a few appropriations bills, but in the nearly half-century this process has been in place, they’ve only really completed the work in four years: 1977, 1989, 1995 and 1997. In only one other year did they even get to more than half of the appropriations bills.
What happens when Congress can’t pass the normal spending bills?
Lawmakers pass a temporary funding bill, known as a “continuing resolution,” or CR. Sometimes these bills are referred to as “stopgap” measures. They keep the government running until, frequently, all of the appropriations are wrapped into a massive omnibus that is passed months after the fiscal year starts.
What’s wrong with this system?
Continuing resolutions usually just buy time. Rather than implement funding for the new year, they simply extend the previous year’s funding. That’s better than a gap in funding, but certainly not the most efficient way to run a massive government.
A 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office identified inefficiencies in the process, but also found that the federal bureaucracy is used to the uncertainty built into the system.
But there’s another element to consider. More and more, consideration of a CR comes at the last minute, along with fears of a government shutdown, like the one we’re seeing now.
The distraction of planning, year after year, for a shutdown is a major inefficiency.
Similarly, when lawmakers get around to the large omnibus spending bill that ties appropriations together, they’re frequently asked to vote days after these massive bills are introduced. The last-minute nature is part of what pressures them to get things done.
How often does Congress need extra time to fund the government?
Pretty much every single year. The current budget process has been in place since the late ’70s. In those 47 fiscal years, there has been at least one CR in all but three fiscal years. The most recent fiscal year in which there was no CR was 1997, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Continuing resolutions are essentially part of the process at this point. Many of the numbers in this story come from that CRS report.
How long do these temporary funding bills last?
They can be enacted for as little as a day or for much longer. It just depends on the year and the politics of the day. The most recent proposal was to fund the government through March.
The CRS report averaged the 200 continuing resolutions that have been put in place since the 1977 fiscal year and found that CRs fund all or part of the government for an average of 137 days, or about a third of the year. In some years, Congress lurches from CR to CR until well into the spring.
For the 2024 fiscal year, which was supposed to begin last October, Biden didn’t sign a yearlong funding bill until late March.
Why does it take so long?
There’s a lot of politicking that goes on around these spending bills each year.
It was a standoff over the 2024 spending bill that cost former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his position. His willingness to pass a short-term funding bill – a CR – with help from Democrats sparked a rebellion from a few hard-line Republicans, even though his ouster frustrated most GOP lawmakers.
It took Republicans weeks to pick Johnson as McCarthy’s replacement.
Johnson ultimately hatched a similar spending deal to one McCarthy had been working on, but not before multiple, additional CRs kept the government running.
He needed Democrats to keep the government open. Johnson will almost certainly need help from Democrats again this year since multiple Republicans vote against pretty much any spending bill.
What happens if there’s a shutdown?
The term “shutdown” is also something of a misnomer. Lapses in funding are a bad way to do business, and they can delay paychecks for federal workers and temporarily shutter some government services. But the most recent shutdowns have affected only portions of the federal government, and they are usually short-lived.
The 2018-2019 partial shutdown, the longest in history at five weeks, did not affect all federal departments and reduced economic output by $11 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
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