The Senate voted overwhelmingly to fund the government through December in a late-night session that also blocked a White House plan to let political appointees control federal grant approvals, a rare bipartisan rebuke with the midterms weeks away.
Senators stayed past 4 a.m. Saturday to push the continuing resolution across the finish line, 90-6, capping an overnight marathon that also saw the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general. The lopsided vote reflected a Washington reality that neither party wanted to own another government shutdown heading into November, even if it meant kicking the real spending fights down the road.
The bill keeps federal agencies running through fiscal 2027, extends Veterans Affairs programs and transportation authorities, and preserves import trade incentives for certain African nations. But the provision drawing the sharpest attention blocks an Office of Management and Budget proposal that would have given political appointees the power to review and approve federal grants, a mechanism critics said could inject politics into everything from biomedical research funding to small-town infrastructure money.
Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, drove the effort to include the grant-review block. She took to the Senate floor before the vote to urge colleagues to pass the legislation, describing it as bipartisan and backed by the Trump administration.
Collins told colleagues on the floor:
"Senate passage of this continuing resolution would be a major step toward averting a damaging shutdown that could harm vital programs and throw the lives of federal workers into disarray."
She also warned that the OMB rule the bill blocks "could politicize grants and harm small, rural communities and biomedical research." That language carried weight. The OMB proposal would have handed political appointees, not career officials or peer reviewers, authority over which grants move forward. For small communities and research institutions that depend on federal funding, the stakes were concrete.
The memory of the last shutdown loomed over the debate. A record-breaking 43-day closure roughly a year earlier had disrupted federal services, created openings for bureaucratic mischief, and left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without paychecks. Nobody in either party wanted a repeat with voters heading to the polls.
Only six senators opposed the bill: Republicans Bill Cassidy and Rand Paul, Democrats Tim Kaine, Ed Markey, and Elizabeth Warren, and independent Bernie Sanders. The source reporting does not detail their individual objections, but the split itself is telling. Paul has long opposed continuing resolutions on principle, viewing them as Congress dodging its duty to pass full appropriations bills. Warren and Sanders have their own well-documented objections to spending packages they consider insufficiently progressive.
That both flanks found reasons to object, while 90 senators in the middle found reasons to vote yes, underscores how strongly the political center wanted to avoid a shutdown fight before the midterms. The 90-6 margin was not close. It was a statement.
The vote also reflected a dynamic that has played out repeatedly in this Congress: when the pressure is high enough, the Senate can move with surprising speed and bipartisan agreement. The question is whether that agreement holds when the continuing resolution expires and lawmakers have to negotiate actual appropriations bills rather than extensions of the status quo.
The bill now heads to the House, which still needs to pass it. That is not guaranteed to be smooth. The House was heading into its August recess as of the Senate vote, and the timeline for floor action remains unclear.
Continuing resolutions are, by definition, stopgaps. They fund the government at existing levels rather than setting new priorities. For conservatives who campaigned on cutting spending and reshaping federal priorities, a CR is a concession, an acknowledgment that the full appropriations process has stalled again. Internal Republican tensions over how to handle government funding have surfaced repeatedly this Congress, and a clean CR does nothing to resolve them.
But the alternative, a shutdown weeks before a midterm election, was a political risk neither party's leadership was willing to take. The 43-day closure last year gave both sides a fresh reminder of how quickly public anger builds when federal workers miss paychecks and government services grind to a halt.
The Senate also used the marathon session to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, though the vote details and circumstances of that confirmation were not reported in the same account. The dual action, funding the government and filling the nation's top law-enforcement post in a single overnight push, reflected a Senate leadership eager to clear its plate before the recess.
Lawmakers have debated whether their own pay should be docked during shutdowns, and the Senate unanimously advanced a resolution to do exactly that earlier in this Congress. The fact that such a measure drew universal support, while actual spending discipline remains elusive, captures the gap between symbolic gestures and governing.
The vote count tells its own story about where the leverage sat. Only three Democrats and one independent voted no. The rest of the Democratic caucus went along, despite months of rhetoric about using the spending process to extract concessions. When the moment came, Democrats folded rather than risk owning a shutdown.
Collins framed the bill as having Trump administration support, and the White House did not publicly object. That alignment, a Republican-led Senate, a Republican White House, and a Democratic minority that chose not to fight, produced the kind of lopsided vote that rarely happens on spending legislation. Whether it holds when the CR expires and real appropriations battles begin is another matter entirely.
The continuing resolution also preserves import trade incentives for some African countries and extends transportation and highway authorities, provisions that drew little controversy but carry real economic weight for industries and communities that depend on them.
Ninety senators agreed that keeping the government open was more important than any single policy fight. That is the easy call. The hard call, setting actual spending priorities, cutting programs that do not work, and confronting a federal budget that grows on autopilot, got punted past the election. Again.
