The House of Representatives on Thursday passed its 12th and final funding bill for the fiscal year — a productive pivot showing Congress can govern after months of legislative turmoil in the chamber.
The House managed to pass all of its funding bills just months after a stand off on a spending package forced the longest government shutdown in history. Lawmakers are one step closer to avoiding another shutdown by the Jan. 30 funding deadline, pending action by the Senate and president. Lawmakers applauded in the chamber as the final package passed, while the Appropriations Committee’s chair and ranking member, Reps. Tom Cole and Rosa DeLauro, took a photo together on the House floor.
The productive few weeks of churning through spending bills and passing them with bipartisan votes came after months of partisan fights that gridlocked Congress. House leaders couldn’t move forward with their agenda, and Republican leadership faced its own members using procedural maneuvers to force votes on issues they worked to avoid, like releasing the Epstein files and renewing health care subsidies.
Even the lawmakers who negotiated the spending bills were surprised. DeLauro posed a rhetorical question to reporters Wednesday night:
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“I don’t believe that anyone thought that by Jan. 30 we would get to pass all the appropriations bills. Am I right?” she said. “We are.”
The House approved the two final sets of appropriations bills Thursday. The first, funding for the Department of Homeland Security, passed 220-207 with help from seven Democrats: Reps. Jared Golden, Henry Cuellar, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen, Vicente Gonzalez and Don Davis. Rep. Thomas Massie was the sole Republican ‘no.’ A shooting by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis had threatened the bill’s prospects for the last two weeks, though Republicans were confident it would ultimately squeak through.
The second package garnered more bipartisan support in a 341-88 vote. It included funding for several departments: Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Defense. Two dozen Republicans, mostly budget hawks, opposed the bill.
House appropriators have been deep in negotiations over the past few months trying to come to bipartisan deals that could acquire support from both parties and be signed by the president, with some appropriators and their staff working over the holiday recess. Cole has said that keeping negotiations at the subcommittee level allowed bills to move forward without fights requiring leadership to step in. Many senior Republican appropriators and Speaker Mike Johnson gave Cole credit for getting the bills passed at a news conference Thursday evening.
Senior appropriators are already preparing for the next funding deadline: Oct. 1. Rep. Mike Simpson said hearings for the next fiscal year will start next month.
Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, another senior Republican appropriator, cited Cole’s “persistence” as key to paving the way for all of the bills.
“If we wouldn’t have been able to do this, then Congress would have been, frankly, diminished in a way that would have been bad for our republic,” Díaz-Balart told reporters after the Homeland Security bill passed.
DeLauro shared her theory recently on why both parties were incentivized to come together and pass spending appropriations bills: the fear of losing their constitutional spending power to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.
“I think there really is an understanding that we have someone at OMB … whose goal is to accumulate the power of the purse for the executive and to be the person that implements it,” DeLauro told reporters. “[Vought] has said that the appropriations should be less bipartisan, so we know where he’s coming from, and I think that is beginning to sink in with people, and say: ‘No, that’s not what the Constitution says. The power of the purse resides here.’”
The last time Congress passed individual appropriations bills — rather than bundling bills or rolling them into one omnibus package to increase the chance of passage — by the yearly funding deadline was in the late 1990s. Congress passed two six-bill minibuses in fiscal year 2024, signed into law by then-President Joe Biden, and has been operating on continuing resolutions, or “CRs,” to extend government funding since. Johnson has long promised to push the House back to regular order. He insisted that committees would follow a more traditional legislative process and not vote on massive spending bills that include funding for all agencies. He also vowed to steer the federal budget in line with President Donald Trump’s priorities.
“Once we pass the final batch this week, Republicans will have finally replaced the last of any Biden-era spending levels with Trump-era spending levels,” Johnson said at a news conference Wednesday. “No more Biden and Pelosi negotiated budgets. We’ve turned that page, and we are not turning back.”
Many Democrats are touting funding wins for their districts in the various appropriations bills. And despite the speaker arguing that the bills are in line with his party’s policies, DeLauro told reporters Wednesday that Democrats reversed cuts in the bills for dozens of programs that Republicans wanted to eliminate.
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