Congressional appropriators are negotiating spending bills to keep the government open. They just don’t know what the government will actually look like by the time the money goes out the door.
The Trump administration’s total overhaul of the executive branch — spearheaded by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and DOGE — is almost entirely being done without congressional approval.
So as the Republican-led Congress considers how to appropriate funds for fiscal year 2026, it’s being confronted with a fundamental question: Does it fund agencies to reflect the Trump administration’s vision of the federal government? Or based on how Congress has legally authorized the executive branch to look?
“Some of the stuff that is restructured goes against the law,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “How the appropriators handled it, I’m not sure.”
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One appropriator, Rep. Robert Aderholt, the chair of the House’s appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and education, told NOTUS that funding has indeed become “a little bit more difficult.”
“When we don’t really have any clarity … sure, there’s difficulties, but we’re open to working through it and we want to try and find a pathway forward,” Aderholt said. “It’s one of those things that takes time.”
These “difficulties” are repeatedly showing up in Republicans’ proposed bill text. The GOP-led House appropriations bill funding the Labor, Education and Health and Human Services Departments — the largest non-defense spending bill — includes a caveat, acknowledging “a number of important proposals to reform and reorganize the Federal government.”
“The Committee notes that the authorizing committees of jurisdiction have not yet had the opportunity to consider these reorganizational proposals. Accordingly, the Committee’s bill and report reflect the current organizational structure of the agencies funded herein,” the top of the bill reads, suggesting that Trump cannot unilaterally transform the federal government without legislative authorization.
Among the starkest examples of Congress’ funding dilemma is with HHS. Earlier this year, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a “dramatic restructuring” of the department to follow Trump’s executive order to reduce the size of the federal government, effectively dissolving various agencies within HHS.
However, appropriators acknowledged that they can’t exactly fund what HHS looks like now because the congressional committees that oversee it — the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate HELP Committee — “have not yet had the opportunity to fully consider and act on the Department’s proposals,” per the bill text.
“Accordingly, the Committee’s bill and report reflect the current organizational structure of the Department,” the bill continues.
Cassidy explained that some agencies that Kennedy has dismantled this year need to be funded the way that Congress, and his committee, approved them.
HHS has not informed the committee “how they’re going to” restructure the department, Cassidy told NOTUS — and that is something that appropriators need to consider.
The White House requested Congress appropriate $83 billion for the department. The current House appropriations bill allocates over $108 billion — a $6 billion decrease from what HHS received in 2025, but $25 billion more than what Trump requested for the 2026 fiscal year.
“We’re working with the administration and trying to figure out a way,” Aderholt said of the White House’s outstanding reform requests.
Appropriations Chair Sen. Susan Collins does not seem to share the same appetite to negotiate the appropriations bills with the White House.
“We did not accept many of the budget recommendations from OMB,” Collins said. “We’ve done a careful review of the administration’s recommendations, and in some cases, they’ve been accepted, and other cases, they’ve not been.”
Members of Congress have been contemplating how to fund a federal government that is transforming in real time for months. In March, Republicans and a handful of Senate Democrats backed a short-term spending extension that maintained most agencies’ fiscal year 2025 funding levels.
With government funding again set to expire on Sept. 30, Republican leadership is pursuing a continuing resolution into November to give appropriators more time to negotiate individual funding bills.
But Democratic opponents to a funding patch have expressed concerns that continuing resolutions give the Trump administration broader leeway to use congressionally appropriated funds at their discretion, rather than following the clear guidelines outlined in individual appropriations bills.
“We’ve clearly seen the difference between the guardrails that are present when we pass full appropriation bills and when we are governing based on CRs,” Democratic appropriator Sen. Tammy Baldwin told NOTUS.
“It’s extremely important to me to have the numbers reflected in a bill that’s signed into law rather than by reference, and to have sort of guardrails put into place that will protect that will keep congressional intent so that an administration can’t willy-nilly freeze funds, impound funds, reallocate and so that’s why we want to pass bills instead of CRs,” Baldwin said.
Some top Democratic appropriators were seeking ways to insert clear guidelines and guardrails into the CR that would limit the Trump administration’s ability to use money at its discretion. But Democrats have complained that Republicans have shut them out of appropriations talks.
House Appropriations Ranking Member Rep. Rosa DeLauro told NOTUS that the Trump administration has “illegally stolen appropriated funds” — and she said she hopes that would get addressed in bipartisan negotiations for a CR that she claims Republicans are blocking.
“We … said that there were to be a bipartisan negotiation of the continuing resolution that had to protect Democratic priorities and that had to deal with them to stop stealing the funds which we appropriate,” DeLauro said. “Hasn’t happened.”
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