Congress Beat the Shutdown Deadline. It Still Hasn't Passed a Budget.

Congress cleared its government funding patch a full month before the deadline this year — the House passed it 370-48 on Sept. 1, the Senate had already passed it 90-6 on Aug. 8, and President Donald Trump signed it into law on Sept. 2. That is unusually early. It is also, once again, not a budget.

The bill, H.R. 6500, is a continuing resolution: a stopgap that freezes federal agencies at their 2026 funding levels through Dec. 11, buying lawmakers roughly 10 more weeks to write the dozen actual appropriations bills that were supposed to fund the 2027 fiscal year starting Oct. 1. According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, this is the 141st time Congress has reached for this exact tool since fiscal year 1998 — an average of about five a year, in a system built to use it rarely.

Continuing resolutions were designed as an emergency brake, not a transmission. By statute they are formulaic: they extend whatever an agency was already spending, with none of the line-item detail a real appropriations bill contains. That is precisely the problem. From 1998 through 2012, roughly a third of each fiscal year, on average, ran on CR funding instead of full-year appropriations. From 2013 onward, that share has climbed to 43%. Four full fiscal years — 2007, 2011, 2013 and 2025 — were funded from start to finish without Congress ever passing a real budget.

A 2018 Government Accountability Office review found the pattern isn't free. Agencies operating under CRs routinely delay contracts and grants, freeze hiring they can't be sure they can sustain, and burn staff time on short-term paperwork that has to be redone once real funding arrives. None of that shows up in a floor vote tally. It shows up months later, in program backlogs nobody can quite trace to a single cause.

This particular CR did more than just extend numbers, which is itself a tell about why the process keeps breaking down. The Senate version — the one that actually became law — blocked, until Dec. 11, a Trump administration rule that would have required federal grants to be personally approved by senior political appointees. Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins and Democrats argued the rule would slow the flow of money and inject politics into decisions that are supposed to be administrative. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., predicted a "big fight" over it in December, though he said White House budget director Russ Vought had told him the delay was tolerable since the rule wouldn't be finalized before then anyway.

The bill also closed what Democrats called a loophole that would have let the administration shift more money to Border Patrol, stripped out a $1 billion request to begin building "Trump-class" battleships, and — after a days-long floor fight from Sens. Ted Budd and Pete Ricketts that the Senate settled with a 61-32 vote to table their amendment — delayed a ban on THC-infused hemp products that had been set to take effect Nov. 12. None of that is budgeting in the ordinary sense. It's a temporary funding vehicle carrying the unrelated fights that a divided Congress couldn't resolve any other way, which is exactly how CRs stop being rare exceptions and start being the load-bearing wall of the whole appropriations process.

The August timing was itself a small act of self-preservation. Lawmakers wanted the funding fight resolved before the long August recess and well clear of the November midterms, and the House's earlier, more bare-bones version — passed without most of the "anomalies," or deviations from current spending, the Trump administration had requested — signaled as much. As reported earlier, when the House and Senate were still working from separate bills, the two chambers didn't agree on Border Patrol funding or the shutdown deadline itself until the Senate's version won out.

None of the underlying disagreements went away. They were just given a Dec. 11 expiration date, three weeks before the current CR's own funding window closes and almost exactly when a new Congress-elect from the midterms will be watching to see whether the twelfth bill of the year finally looks like a budget — or like number 142.