House and Senate Passed Different Bills to Avoid the Same Shutdown

Congress does not have one plan to keep the government funded past September. It has two, and they don't even agree on when the next deadline should land.

The House passed its version on July 21, a bare-bones extension of current funding through Dec. 4 that Speaker Mike Johnson called "as clean as they come." There are no poison pills. There's no maneuvers. There's nothing other than a simple extension of current funding levels, he said. It passed 220-205, with six Democrats crossing over and only Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie voting no.

Then on Sunday, the Senate released its own version, negotiated by Appropriations Chair Susan Collins and Vice Chair Patty Murray, that runs current funding not to Dec. 4 but to Dec. 11 — and looks nothing like a bare-bones extension. On Monday, senators voted 89-4 just to start debating it.

Both dates share one thing in common: they land after Election Day. The House Appropriations chairman, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, put the logic plainly before the vote. We want to take away the possibility of a shutdown between now and the election, he said. We've seen that happen twice in this Congress already, generated by the Senate, and I'm not willing to risk a third time if we can avoid that. Senate Majority Leader John Thune framed the early jump-start the same way. Unfortunately, I think after two government shutdowns that have extended for a long period of time, it's better for everybody if there's predictability, certainty, and just to take that issue off the table, he told reporters.

Those two prior shutdowns are why this is happening months earlier than usual. A 45-day shutdown last fall, the longest in U.S. history at the time, was triggered by a fight over health care subsidies. A second one followed almost immediately: a 76-day Department of Homeland Security shutdown that began in mid-February after immigration enforcement personnel fatally shot two American citizens in Minneapolis, with Democrats withholding DHS funding until Republicans agreed to reforms like body cameras and restrictions on face coverings for agents. That standoff only ended when Republicans used the reconciliation process to fund ICE through the rest of President Trump's term on a party-line vote — bypassing the Senate's 60-vote threshold entirely, and the precedent Thune says he'd rather not repeat this time.

The Border Patrol language is the real fault line, not the date. House Democrats voted almost unanimously against their chamber's version last month because, as Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro put it, the bill let the Trump administration use billions provided by this bill to fund Border Patrol without any substantial reforms to how that agency operates. The Senate bill closes that door — DeLauro called the Senate text "a clear improvement over the House Republican continuing resolution" even while pushing for the grant-rule fight to be settled for good rather than just delayed to December.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described his chamber's version as a "responsible pathway" that "allows us to continue negotiating a budget that won't leave working families behind" — a notably warmer reception than Democrats gave the House bill 12 days earlier.

Neither bill is law yet. The Senate is racing to pass its version before senators leave for a month-long recess this week; the House is already gone until September. That gap means the two chambers can't reconcile a Dec. 4 bill with a Dec. 11 bill, a Border-Patrol clause with no Border-Patrol clause, until lawmakers are back in the same building — which puts the real negotiating window somewhere in the first weeks of a September session already crowded with everything Congress left unfinished in August.