Something shocking is happening in Washington.
Since the record 43-day government shutdown ended in mid-November, congressional appropriators are trying to get their power back. And party leaders are pushing hard to give it to them.
Battered and bruised following the record-breaking shutdown, a flood of stopgap funding bills and rank-and-file members who refuse to vote for spending bills, House and Senate leaders are on the brink of reaching agreement on a full slate of FY2026 appropriations bills. They’ll still have to pass these bills — more accurately, funding packages — before the end of this month, though.
Both Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune made this a priority when they took over their respective posts — the much-ballyhooed “return to regular order.”
Yet let’s not give anyone too much credit here. It’s mid-January, three months into FY2026, and they’re just getting around to this. And there are still major hangups with the Homeland Security spending bill.
Not to mention that the House Republican leadership embarrassingly lost another floor vote Tuesday evening on a labor policy bill. Johnson and GOP leaders then pulled two other bills from consideration. All the House could pass was a measure that loosened water-flow regulations on shower heads. Seriously.
With such razor-thin margins, a group of discontented conservatives or GOP moderates can sink any bill. Someday, House GOP leaders will figure out how to avoid that. This Congress may be over by the time they do, however.
Yet the House has already approved six bipartisan FY2026 funding bills and is expected to pass two more today: National Security-State and Financial Services-General Government. Next week, the House will take up its final spending package, potentially its hardest: Labor-HHS, Defense, Transportation-HUD and Homeland Security.
The Senate will vote this week on the $180 billion Commerce-Justice-Science, Interior and Energy and Water package. This passed the House by a huge margin, 397-28. The lopsided results showed how much members want to avoid another shutdown.
Remember: All these bills have to be passed by Jan. 30, the shutdown deadline under the current CR.
Homeland blues. Funding for the Homeland Security Department — already politically fraught following President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown — is even more difficult after last week’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minnesota by an ICE agent.
Some Democrats have warned that they’ll vote against any bill without new ICE restrictions and oversight mandates. Faced with that reality, several House and Senate leaders have suggested they may have to fund DHS via a yearlong CR, a suboptimal result for appropriators. The Homeland Security Department, though, received tens of billions in new funds already under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, so the White House could live with a CR.
But in recent days, leaders in both parties and appropriators have sounded optimistic about passing the DHS spending bill.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), the top Democrat on the DHS subcommittee, told us that negotiators are close to agreement on the Homeland Security package and they hope to release text this weekend, along with the other three funding bills. House GOP leaders may split the DHS vote from the other bills to ease passage.
“I feel cautiously optimistic,” said the ever-optimistic House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “If you don’t believe you can get there, you certainly won’t, so I’m not expecting a CR.”
Appropriations rebound. Nobody needs these wins more than appropriators. The House and Senate Appropriations panels have clung to their final bit of relevancy since OMB Director Russ Vought declared last year that the funding process should be less bipartisan. Trump, Vought and other senior administration officials have also run roughshod over the panels’ traditional prerogatives. Yet Vought – to the relief of appropriators – hasn’t publicly derailed the negotiating process so far.
This is an important moment for appropriators to show they can still pass bipartisan spending bills and reassert congressional authority over the nation’s purse strings. Cole said during a Rules Committee hearing that passing these spending bills is best for Congress as an institution.
Plus, if Democrats win the House majority this fall, there may not be another chance for Congress to pass full-year appropriations bills in a divided government. Meaning it makes sense for the White House to cut deals now.
“This is what we do. We keep the government open,” House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said.
The Senate. The timing on all of this is more difficult in the Senate. As we noted, senators are set to pass the three-bill package this week: Commerce-Justice-Science, Interior and Energy and Water.
But senators will leave town for recess after this week, which doesn’t give them much time to pass two more funding packages before Jan. 30. The Senate would have to combine the final two packages for consideration during the last week of January to make that deadline.
Thune has vowed to keep next week’s recess intact no matter what. There are CODELs leaving Washington on Thursday, with high-profile bipartisan trips to Europe and other destinations. So there is going to have to be a real burst of action up to — and maybe a little beyond — Jan. 30.
