America's Talking - Lawmakers Eye Bipartisan Funding Stopgap as Appropriations Bills Make Minimal Headway

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

(The Center Square) – With 26 days until the federal government runs out of money, top appropriators have narrowed in on their preferred funding gameplan: push the equivalent of the Senate’s three-bill minibus through the House, then let a Continuing Resolution temporarily cover the rest. Approving a CR would mark the fourth time in a row that U.S. lawmakers have punted on funding the government properly, having passed three CRs in fiscal year 2025 to keep government funding essentially on cruise control. Congress is supposed to craft and pass 12 appropriations bills on an annual basis, providing updated funding for federal agencies to spend on programs.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_89a16630-f91a-4610-b832-b0cb77b1fc6a.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America's Talking, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. With lawmakers back in Washington, D.C., after Congress's August recess, the clock is ticking to get plans in place to continue funding the federal government by the end of the current fiscal year, September 30th. Joining me to discuss this is the Center Square congressional reporter, Terese Boudreau. Torres, that's not a lot of time to pass the number of spending bills.

where are we at the process? Yeah, so it's not a lot of time. In fact, it is probably not enough time. Right now, the Senate has passed three bills in one package called a minibus. And then the House, as of yesterday, has also passed three bills, but separately. And there are 12 total bills that need to pass. And each bill has to pass both the House and the Senate. And currently, none of those bills have passed both chambers.

And so we have that deadline coming up on September 30th, and it took weeks for these previous, these other bills that have passed one of the chambers for that to happen. So especially given the lack of bipartisanship in the House, nobody is believing they're going to be able to pass all 12 in time, including leaders. They're, the appropriations heads are looking at other options besides a normal government funding process at this point. And what is that process, Derez? It's been a while since Congress has passed full year budgets. They've been passing what they call continuing resolutions, which essentially set spending levels at what was passed previously.

Yes. So actually, Congress never even passed a full, the full 12 appropriations bills, like a full proper budget last year, fiscal year 20, for fiscal year 2025. So we have actually, the government has been running on continuing resolutions since before Biden left office, which means that a fourth continuing resolution, because they passed three last year, just to keep the government funding on cruise control, a fourth one would yet again reauthorize funding from fiscal year 2024, which again was when Biden was in office. And so that includes a lot of. of programs like with climate or DEI or whatever. A lot of initiatives are things that

Republicans do not like. They would be extending funding for those things. Just besides the fact that, again, it would have been more than 12 months since the government has been properly funded. But at this point, a continuing resolution may be the only option because otherwise you get at least a partial government shutdown. And of course, no party wants to be on the hook for that. and place the blame on each other and say it's Democrats' fault or it's Republicans' fault, but ultimately everybody would get blamed. And so nobody wants that. So apparently appropriators, so the appropriations chairs are the ones who kind of oversee the appropriations process,

getting those bills through subcommittees. Both Republicans and the Democratic vice chairs are thinking that, okay, the Senate's three-bill minibus was bipartisan. The Senate's been going at it kind of from a more bipartisan route than the House, mostly because, you know, even though Republicans have majorities in both chambers, they still need seven Democratic votes in the Senate, whereas the House can just do stuff, you know, Republicans in the House can do stuff wherever they want.

So they're saying, okay, what if we take these three bipartisan bills, and if we can get them through the House, then those three can go into effect. So the agencies that those cover, which includes veterans affairs and military construction, the legislative branch, those agencies and those programs will have new funding. And then the rest of them, so that would cover the remaining nine bills and the agencies and programs that are covered under those bills, the rest of them would be covered by a continuing resolution.

So the rest of them would run on fiscal year 2024 funding. So that might be a little bit more palatable, I think they're hoping, to Republicans who were promised last year that, or in March, rather, that they would agree to this third continuing resolution because they were told, hey, for fiscal year 2026, we'll do it the right way. Just agree to this now so we can get all this other legislative stuff done, and then we'll do it the right way. Well, you know, that's not happening. So again, this eight, a slightly smaller in scale continuing resolution and then passing the three of the 12 appropriations bills, that looks like the most likely route at this point. That's at least what congressional leaders are saying. Of course, Congress has been passing these continuing resolutions of the federal budget. They have been deficit budgets well over $1 trillion, near $2 trillion a year. The U.S. debt is now at more than $37.3 trillion. President Trump has said in the past that he wants Congress to pass balance budgets,

these continuing resolutions which keep spending levels at what they have been. That's not going to eliminate the deficit spending that we've seen over the last several years. With the lack of partisanship in Washington, D.C., it doesn't seem like they're going to be able to eliminate those deficits. and start to reduce the national debt. Yeah, that's, at this point, I mean, again, there are some fiscal hawks like, you know, Chip Roy and Thomas Massey in the House and I think maybe a couple in the Senate who, you know, they try to hold the line with that. But it's kind of like I think Trump's agenda is overpowering all of it, right?

So a lot of the messaging is just, you know, from Republican leaders to their constituencies look like we care about the deficit as well. But, you know, right now we need to, you know, pass this part of Trump's agenda. So whether that's tax cuts or whether that's making sure that funding from the next year cuts a bunch of, you know, so-called green energy subsidies or diversity initiatives or stuff like that. They're kind of trying to send the message that, okay, for the greater good, good, you know, we, you know, meaning, meaning what Trump wants to get done, we need to pass this, this one big, beautiful bill, or in this case, these, you know, appropriations bills. So it's a very complicated dynamic because there are quite a few Republicans who really don't like the fiscal trajectory that we're on. And they agree that we should be cutting spending. And to be fair. A few of the, or at least many of the appropriations bills that are coming out of the house, which again, like I said, if we take the CR route, probably won't see the light of day for quite a while. They do cut spending in different areas like that, you know, it's like, oh,

there's 2% decrease overall and then there's maybe a 15% decrease here. So there is, there are like hundreds of millions of cuts. But, you know, in the long run, it's not like it's really going to, doesn't make a big impact on the deficit. So again, I think right now it's, it's, there are some Republicans who really want to reduce spending, but they're kind of caught because they don't want to be opposing Trump's agenda. But sometimes Trump's agenda is just very costly and needs to get done right now. And so it doesn't, it doesn't leave a lot of, um, a lot of time to do things, to do things carefully. So, you know, um, we'll see with the, the, the, the, the And the, the passing a CR with the three-bill minibus, it's probably, it's the most likely thing that's going to happen.

Well, Trez, it sounds like you and your and our colleagues at the Center Square who cover Congress in Washington, D.C. are going to have a busy few weeks ahead of you. Thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with the budgeting process and much more at thecentersquare.com.