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.

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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........

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