Three of twelve spending bills, one December 11 cliff, and a calendar built around campaigning
By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report
WASHINGTON. Congress has done in an election year what it does best: it settled the deadline before it settled the work. A stopgap bill, passed 90 to 6 in the Senate and 370 to 48 in the House, funds the government through December 11, five weeks after Election Day. Only three of the twelve annual spending bills have cleared the House, and the Senate has passed none, according to Defense One. The July vote shows the parties can agree when the goal is delay. What remains is the full-year work, where trade offs must be named.
House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole put it candidly: “The fiscal-year deadline is outpacing the work that remains.” The House then scrapped its final two weeks in Washington before the November 3 vote. Rep. Robert Aderholt told Roll Call, “I don’t think there’s any probably compelling reason that we need to be here.” Members went home to campaign, and the decisions that carry political risk stayed behind for December.
None of this is new. The Congressional Research Service found that at least one continuing resolution has been enacted for every fiscal year since 1998. The National Taxpayers Union counts only four years in half a century, the last being fiscal 1997, when Congress finished every spending bill by October 1. In 10 of the 15 lame duck sessions the CRS reviewed, Congress enacted no regular appropriations bills at all after the election. The pattern is not partisan. It is structural, and election calendars fit it neatly.
Consider what lands after the ballots are counted. December 11 is also the expiration date for Veterans Affairs health care extenders, farm bill provisions and the surface transportation authorization, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Medicare’s physician payment increase expires December 31. The hardest choices on health care, agriculture and highways arrive together, when no voter is watching the scoreboard. A vote on a farm program in October is a campaign ad in waiting. In December it is a footnote.
I do not claim members are hiding. The incentives are simply visible, and that is the point. Voters will choose a Congress on November 3 without having seen how the current one intends to fund the government.
The costs of this habit fall on people who never appear on a ballot. Fiscal 2026 included three legal funding gaps totaling 120 full days, the National Taxpayers Union reports. Federal employees missed paychecks during the longest shutdown in American history, Defense One notes. Grant managers, contracting officers and program directors plan their years around deadlines that shift every autumn, and agencies burn staff time on contingency plans rather than on the services taxpayers fund. Every day spent preparing for a lapse is a day not spent on the work Congress already approved.
Even the stopgap is not neutral. It temporarily blocks a proposed Office of Management and Budget rule that would subject federal grants to review by political appointees, and it bars the administration from redirecting money to Border Patrol from other programs. Those are substantive fights, postponed rather than resolved, and they return on December 11 with a new Congress arriving in January.
Practical remedies exist, and each has a serious critic. An automatic continuing resolution would keep the government open at last year’s levels whenever deadlines pass, ending the shutdown threat. Opponents reply that it removes the pressure to finish and locks in old spending, and they are not wrong. A narrower fix costs less: require recorded floor votes on all twelve bills, or a written explanation of why not, before Congress leaves for a campaign recess. Members could still delay, but voters would see who did.
A third option is disclosure. Congress could publish a running calendar that lists each spending bill, its committee status and its target vote date, updated weekly. Any controller would call this basic project management. Corporate boards would not tolerate a budget process that misses its own deadline nearly every year for three decades, and the public should not either.
The lesson is simple. When a deadline is moved past an election, ask which decision moved with it, and who benefits from your not seeing it before you vote.
Jose E. Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and founder of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego, California.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under the direction, review and editorial control of the author.