In December, as the House kicked the can on government funding once again, Speaker Mike Johnson was adamant that his conference wouldn’t extend current funding levels when the next deadline came on March 14.
With just seven legislative work days between now and then, however, the House is strapping on its can-kicking shoes and preparing to do exactly that — pass another extension of current funding. And this time, Republicans want to pass a bill that extends government funding until October.
Although appropriators have spent weeks negotiating a top-line funding number, talks have seemingly stalled out over Democratic demands for assurances that President Donald Trump will actually use the funds that Congress appropriates for their intended purposes. Since that’s a nonstarter for Republicans — why would Trump sign a law that hamstrings his own power? — the two parties are locked in a standoff with the clock winding down and a shutdown two weeks away.
A continuing resolution to Sept. 30 with some so-called “anomalies” — basically an appropriations word for a change in current funding — has become the consensus solution among appropriators. Republicans know they can’t pass a stopgap measure without losing dozens within their ranks who are almost automatically opposed to continuing resolutions on principle. They need Democrats to make up the difference.
Whether they can get Democrats is the question.
The resulting standoff has heightened tensions around Capitol Hill and has raised the prospect of a government shutdown within Trump’s first 100 days in office.
“We ran out of time in September. We ran out of time in December. We’re running out of time in March,” Rep. Steve Womack, a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS. “I’m beginning to feel like the appropriations process is irrelevant.”
Womack continued that Congress had gotten “way too accustomed to punting our statutory duty by just kicking it to leadership and saying, ‘Here, you make the call.’”
“So count me as one of the people that are very frustrated by the fact that we can’t do one of the basic functions of our job,” he said.
When NOTUS pressed whether a full-year continuing resolution was even politically viable at this point, Womack said that was “to be determined.”
While some Democrats have signaled that they’re willing to play hardball with a shutdown to secure assurances that Trump and Elon Musk can’t simply pull back congressionally directed funds, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro, told reporters Thursday that Democrats were not shutting down the government.
“Which is why we’re working as hard as we can,” DeLauro said.
Still, she acknowledged that, with March 14 two weeks away, there was no concrete plan.
“We don’t have a bill yet, for God’s sake,” she said. “We don’t have a top line, we don’t have subcommittee allocation so that we can come up with a bill, then we can, you know, figure out whatever the heck is going to be in the bill.”
In light of a potential showdown with Democrats, Rep. Tom Cole, the Appropriations Committee’s chair, said on Thursday that a clean continuing resolution for the rest of the year was probable, adding that he thinks “that’s where the administration is at, they would prefer a CR.”
Cole is reportedly urging Speaker Mike Johnson to put the clean continuing resolution on the floor next week, daring Democrats to vote for it. Either the legislation would pass and Republicans would avert a shutdown, or Republicans would bolster their case that a shutdown is on Democrats.
But, complicating matters, Johnson has his own ideas. He told CNN on Wednesday that he wants a CR to include “anomalies” like codifying Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts to the federal government.
Of course, that is only raising expectations for the GOP’s DOGE enthusiasts.
When asked if the continuing resolution should include the DOGE cuts, Rep. Aaron Bean, co-chair of the House DOGE Caucus, was emphatic that it should.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “100% going to push for their inclusion.”
A continuing resolution does present an awkward challenge for Republicans. By extending government funding at current levels, they’d also be extending funding for now essentially defunct arms of the federal government, like the United States Agency for International Development.
But Cole was clear-eyed that Democrats would likely rather shut down the government than enshrine the very cuts they have spent weeks blasting as immoral and illegal.
“I’m happy to consider,” Cole said of including the DOGE cuts in the CR. “I just think it’s hard to do. So you know, to me, the best thing if we have to do a CR, and I think we will, is to do a relatively clean, straightforward [CR with] anomalies.”
Appropriator — and former Trump Interior Secretary — Rep. Ryan Zinke told NOTUS that he has other concerns he’d like to see handled in a CR. Specifically, he’s eyeing disaster relief for wildfires in California and would like to see a tranche of funding for border enforcement.
“Tom Homan is going to run out of money,” Zinke said of Trump’s newly appointed border czar. “We’re going to have to make some adjustments earlier rather than later to keep the same tempo as currently he is doing.”
That may just be one member’s view, but with a razor-thin House GOP majority, one member’s view could sink the spending bill — especially if Republicans try to muscle through a party-line approach.
Multiple Republican appropriators told NOTUS they believe Johnson’s ability to adopt a party-line budget resolution with just one defection gives Republicans more leverage in shutdown negotiations.
“I would bet they hedged the bet that we could pass the budget resolution,” Zinke said of Democrats. “All of a sudden, the budget resolution is now passed.”
But even if by some miracle Republicans could pass a spending bill without Democrats — which even Cole has acknowledged would defy political gravity — they’ll have to contend with the Senate, where they will need buy-in from at least seven Democratic senators to overcome a filibuster.
With limited time left, lawmakers left town Thursday no closer than they’ve been in months. In fact, if they avert a shutdown, it’s only because they’re so far from a larger solution.
“We still have a timing issue,” Womack said. “We won’t come back until, you know, less than two weeks before we lapse.”
The paradox of making so little headway in spending negotiations is that a stopgap bill will almost certainly be needed one way or another — either Republicans and Democrats agree to a CR for the rest of the year, or they strap on the can-kicking shoes yet again and set up another deadline.
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS. Daniella Diaz, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.