Bipartisan funding bills stall as Senate Republicans press forward without Democrats

Senate Republicans are preparing to push ahead on next year’s government funding bill without Democratic buy-in, with the stalemate threatening to fracture the historically bipartisan spending negotiations right from the jump.

An Appropriations Committee meeting to move the first four of 12 bills forward had been canceled twice earlier this month as Republicans and Democrats sought to reach a deal on an overall spending number for fiscal year 2027. It was then scheduled for Thursday — even though no such agreement had been reached.

But that meeting has been postponed until after July 4 because Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is absent, according to a Republican aide.

McConnell’s vote matters because all of the Democrats on the panel are likely to vote “no” on the bills, a change from previous years. They say they need an agreement on a top line, an overall spending number, before moving forward.

“You want to agree to the overall framework before you start filling in the rooms, right?” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the panel, told The Hill this week. “You want to know what the architecture of the house is before you start planning out each room.”

The four individual bills up for review by the committee are not contested on their own. Considered among the least controversial of the 12 annual bills, they were negotiated over months within each subcommittee in a process that lawmakers said went smoothly as always.

“We started out the year good again,” said Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), the top Republican in charge of........

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