On Sept. 1, the House voted 370 to 48 to fund the federal government through Dec. 11, a stopgap the Senate had already cleared 90 to 6 three weeks earlier. Twenty-nine Democrats and 19 Republicans voted no. Everyone else called it done. Nobody called it a budget, because it isn’t one.
A continuing resolution locks in the prior year’s funding levels instead of passing the 12 annual appropriations bills that are supposed to set spending line by line. As of late August, the House had passed two of those 12 bills. The Senate had passed none. Congress has now gone essentially three decades without finishing its own budget on time. The last time all twelve bills were signed before the Oct. 1 start of the fiscal year was 1997.
Stay informed.Stay ahead.
Join Washington Examiner for unlimited access to the news, analysis, and commentary that matter most.
Already a member? Log in
The dollar figure riding on that failure is not small. The federal government’s own fiscal 2027 discretionary request totals roughly $1.8 trillion in base funding, before the separate defense reconciliation dollars Congress is negotiating on a different track. None of that money is getting the line-by-line review appropriators are supposed to give it this year. It is simply rolling forward on last year’s terms, unexamined, until Dec. 11.
The timing of that date is the real story. Dec. 11 is not arbitrary. It falls 38 days after the midterm elections on Nov. 3. Rep. Tom Cole, who helped write the deal, told reporters the stopgap bought Congress time it needs to get through the election cycle. Translation, from a controller’s seat: lawmakers scheduled the real spending fight for after voters can no longer hold them accountable for the answer.
This is not the first time this Congress has managed the calendar this way. Less than a year ago, it presided over the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, 43 days, from late September through Nov. 13, 2025. The Congressional Budget Office put the sustained economic costs at $7 billion or more, with weekly losses estimated near $15 billion at points during the standoff. More than 670,000 federal employees were furloughed. Another 730,000 were required to work without pay, at a back-pay cost the CBO priced around $400 million a day. Forty-two million people nearly lost food assistance before the shutdown finally ended.
A private-sector controller who ran an organization this way, missing budget deadlines for 30 straight cycles, funding operations on short-term extensions instead of approved plans, then punctuating one of those extensions with a seven-week furlough, would not get to call any of it fiscal discipline. Agencies operating under a continuing resolution cannot start new programs and cannot sign multiyear contracts. That uncertainty carries a real cost even when the lights stay on, and it lands on the same taxpayers who will eventually foot the bill either way.
The riders tucked into this stopgap make the avoidance more visible, not less. Negotiators used the bill to delay a ban on intoxicating hemp products and to block, temporarily, a rule that would have given political appointees more control over how federal grant money is distributed. Both are live disputes. Neither was resolved. Both were simply parked inside a bill whose real purpose was making sure nobody had to resolve anything before Election Day.
STOP CALLING NOVEMBER A ‘MIDTERM’ — MICHIGAN IS FIGHTING FOR ITS ENTIRE FUTURE
Whichever party wins control of the House and Senate on Nov. 3 will spend the following weeks negotiating actual spending levels under a very different set of incentives than an accountable body would use in daylight, before voters had their say. Members who lost their seats will still cast a vote. Members who won on one platform may face a lame-duck session built around a different one entirely. None of that is illegal, and none of it is unprecedented. But it is worth naming plainly: the calendar for this government’s real budget decisions was built to fall after, not before, the one moment voters get to weigh in on who makes them.
The fix is not complicated, even if the politics are. Appropriations deadlines exist for a reason, and treating them as negotiable on a bipartisan basis is what makes them worthless on a bipartisan basis, too. A Congress that wanted voters to judge its fiscal choices with real information in hand would finish its spending bills before an election, not schedule the fight for after one. This Congress, again, chose otherwise, and did so with a lopsided vote on a bill nearly one-fifth of its own members opposed and almost everyone else let pass anyway.
Jose E. Navarro is a financial controller and founder of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego.
