The U.S. Capitol, seen on Thursday, where all work has stopped on advancing full-year appropriations bills amid the government shutdown. (Kylie Cooper/Reuters)
The federal government has been shut down for almost four weeks, with no end in sight. But even if Congress finds a way out of its current stalemate, lawmakers fear they'll be right back in the same position soon.
A dozen times, Democrats in the Senate have rejected a Republican proposal that would fund the government through Nov. 21. They want Republicans to agree to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, which will raise health insurance premiums. Republicans say they won't negotiate on the policy while the government is shut down. Each party blames the other for the extended closure.
The idea behind the Nov. 21 deadline was to give Congress more time to pass full-year spending bills, known as appropriations. Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike acknowledge that the deadline would have been hard to meet to begin with. But now, as the weeks pass, Republicans argue the measure that would have bought more time, known as a continuing resolution or CR, becomes less useful.
"Every day that passes, we have less time to fund the government," Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters last week. The longer the shutdown lasts, he said, "it's going to become harder and harder to actually have a normal appropriations process, which pushes us into a long-term CR mode."
Congress hasn't completed any of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the federal government. The House has passed its own version of three bills -- which would fund programs related to defense, energy and water, military construction and veterans affairs -- and the Senate has passed its own bills to fund agriculture programs, the legislative branch, and military construction and veterans affairs.
But even for those bills, the process is far from complete. Lawmakers in the House and Senate still have to reconcile any differences between their proposals and pass it through both chambers.
Delays like this aren't abnormal: Congress has passed all 12 appropriations bills by the Oct. 1 funding deadline only four times since the process was put in place in the 1970s. Usually, lawmakers pass a short-term funding extension to keep the government open through the fall and roll most annual spending bills into one massive year-end spending package known as an omnibus. (The programs that Congress struggles to fund every year account for a small slice of overall federal spending, which is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment, and other similar benefits.)
Lawmakers usually extend existing funding for short periods until they can pass full-year spending bills. Partisan division in Congress has made short- and even long-term extensions more common. Until it shut down on Oct. 1, the government had been operating under extensions of the most recent full funding law -- which was signed by President Joe Biden in March 2024.
But all the work on advancing full-year appropriations bills has ground to a halt amid the shutdown. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has kept the lower chamber out of session since mid-September in an attempt to pressure Senate Democrats to accept the GOP funding extension.
Senate Republicans attempted last week to advance a bill funding the Defense Department, but Democrats blocked it because Republicans could not assure them they could pair it with another measure to fund the Labor and the Health and Human Services departments.
Democrats say they want to continue negotiating on full-year appropriations bills, but they have repeatedly raised concerns that any bipartisan spending agreement could be undone by President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who have pushed the traditional boundaries of executive branch spending powers.
Johnson said this month that more rescissions -- or cancellations of existing spending -- would be coming, in addition to the two packages the president has already sent to Congress.
"It's another indication that Republicans are not operating in good faith and are unwilling to enter into a bipartisan spending agreement that actually is subsequently administered by Donald Trump and the executive branch," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) told reporters.
Republicans have argued that the longer the shutdown drags on, the more likely it is that they will need to consider another long-term extension. Some members of the House Freedom Caucus have even proposed skipping this year's appropriations process altogether and extending current funding through the end of next September.
"Nothing's happening in Appropriations. And nothing will happen until we come out of the shutdown. And even then, I'm not sure that anything will happen," said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"I'm not wishing for this result," he added, "but if I were a betting man, I would say that there's at least a 50-50 chance that for the rest of President Trump's term, we will fund the government through CRs and rescission packages sent over to us by the White House."
Democrats have argued that such funding extensions give the Trump administration more power over federal spending.
"I'm not supporting a full-year CR," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said. "A full-year CR locks in health care cuts; it locks in Trump's corruption and his illegality. Of course that's a good deal for Republicans."
Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.