Congress punted its biggest fiscal responsibility past the midterm elections on Tuesday, passing a short-term funding bill that keeps the government open through December 11, and leaving full-year spending fights for a lame-duck session when every political calculation will have changed.
The House voted 370, 48 to approve the continuing resolution, which funds federal agencies at current levels and averts a government shutdown that would have hit at the end of September. The Senate had already cleared the same bill before the House took it up. President Trump is expected to sign it.
The lopsided vote total, 370 in favor, just 48 opposed, masks the deeper failure. Congress controls the power of the purse through 12 individual appropriations bills that are supposed to fund the government each fiscal year. None of those bills are done. Instead, lawmakers chose a stopgap measure that changes nothing about current spending levels and pushes every hard decision into the narrow window between Election Day on November 3 and the new December 11 deadline.
Rep. Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, did not pretend the continuing resolution was a victory. He said he wants to finish all 12 spending bills before the end of the year, but admitted the odds are uncertain.
Cole pointed a finger directly at Democrats, accusing them of blocking a full-year funding agreement in order to damage Sen. Susan Collins politically. Collins, a Maine Republican, chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and has been described as politically vulnerable heading into the midterms. Any appropriations deal requires 60 Senate votes to clear a filibuster, giving Democrats enough leverage to stall the process.
Cole was blunt about what happens after voters go to the polls. He told reporters:
"We will act like we can come back and things will be exactly the way they were when we left. They won't be. Everybody's calculations will change. Everybody's point of view will change. It'll have an enormous impact about what happens for the balance of the year."
That candor is worth noting. The chairman of the committee responsible for funding the federal government just acknowledged that Congress is governing around election results rather than on the merits of the spending itself.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the Connecticut Democrat who hopes to reclaim the Appropriations Committee gavel if her party wins the House, offered a sunnier take. She framed the December deadline as workable and called finishing the appropriations bills a bipartisan goal.
"The midterm election will have an effect, but the goal is that we need to pass appropriations bills before the end of the year. That is a bipartisan view of where we need to go with the committee, and so that's what we are going to press for."
But the bipartisan spirit has clear limits. One of the central sticking points in the full-year negotiations is military spending. Trump has called for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, a sharp increase over the current level, which already sits at a record-breaking $1 trillion. Democrats have rejected that figure. Until one side moves, the 12 individual spending bills remain stalled, and stopgap measures like this one fill the vacuum.
DeLauro's closing line, "Let's get to the finish line", sounds determined. But Congress has been running this same play for years: punt the deadline, promise a deal later, then scramble through a lame-duck session under pressure. The finish line keeps moving.
Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. That unified control makes the inability to pass full-year spending bills harder to explain away. Cole's accusation that Democrats are using the filibuster to block a deal has merit, Senate rules give the minority real leverage on spending, but it also underscores a structural problem Republicans have not solved.
If the GOP cannot assemble 60 Senate votes for a funding package, the options narrow fast: negotiate with Democrats on their terms, change Senate rules, or keep passing stopgaps that freeze spending at levels set under prior agreements. The continuing resolution signed into law this week takes the third path.
The broader dynamics around this funding fight have played out over weeks. Senate leadership earlier prioritized government funding over other legislative priorities, a decision that created friction within the Republican conference. The stopgap bill itself moved through the Senate with overwhelming support, but the ease of that vote only highlighted how far apart the two parties remain on the substance of a real spending deal.
Now the clock resets to December 11. Congress will return from the campaign trail after the midterms and face the same unresolved questions, plus the added complication of election results that could shift the balance of power in January. Cole himself acknowledged the election will have "a tremendous impact" on what happens next.
The December deadline creates a scenario that should concern taxpayers. Lame-duck sessions, the period between an election and the seating of a new Congress, are notorious for rushed deals, omnibus spending packages stuffed with provisions that never received proper debate, and last-minute horse-trading that prioritizes political survival over fiscal discipline.
If Democrats gain seats in November, they will have even less incentive to cut a deal before the new Congress is seated in January. If Republicans hold or expand their margins, the pressure shifts, but the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate remains unchanged. Either way, the continuing resolution that passed the House this week guarantees that the real spending fight happens under maximum political pressure and minimum transparency.
DeLauro's stated goal is to finalize full-year appropriations before 2027 begins. Cole wants the same thing but concedes he does not know whether it is possible. Neither lawmaker offered a concrete path to bridging the gap between Trump's $1.5 trillion defense request and what Democrats will accept.
The government stays open. The hard choices stay on the shelf. And voters head to the polls in November without knowing how Congress plans to spend their money for the year already underway.
Governing by stopgap is not governing, it is postponing the bill and hoping someone else picks up the tab.
