Congress Has 2 Weeks to Fund Government as Shutdown Deadline Nears

WASHINGTON—Congress is running out of time to release a plan to fund government before the shutdown date of March 14.

The CR was the second of this fiscal year. In September 2024, Congress passed the first such measure after it could not enact permanent spending bills in time before the deadline on Sept. 30. The latest CR set the funding expiry date on March 14, after which the government will shut down if a permanent funding bill or another CR isn’t passed.

The frequent “shutdown” cliffs have become a normal feature of American politics.

Congress last enacted permanent spending bills before the deadline in Fiscal Year 1998, after which it has always been late. However, it is usually able to pass permanent spending bills by March—about six months into the new fiscal year, after which the cycle of CRs continues.

This time, Congress may miss even this deadline, thereby prompting the passage of a third CR that may cover the remainder of the fiscal year—meaning that the whole year is funded by CRs rather than permanent bills, which would not have funding structured to support the current president’s agenda.

“’I’m certainly not interested in sending a bill to the President that he’s not willing to sign,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who is leading the effort to draft permanent bills for fiscal year 2025, told reporters on Feb. 24.

Since the 119th Congress, where Republicans have slim majorities in both houses, was seated on Jan. 3, House Republicans have begun anew the drafting process, to write spending bills informed by the Trump administration’s priorities.

Negotiations about the content of those bills are ongoing, and no proposals or plans have been released.

Republicans in both houses of Congress have not been focused on appropriations so much as the budget “reconciliation” process, which is being used to secure funds for the Trump administration’s policy priorities, such as finalizing construction of the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, operations to remove illegal immigrants from the United States, and the extension of tax cuts made by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. The reconciliation process, while authorizing funding, cannot be leveraged to also fund the government due to procedural restrictions.

“You can’t do appropriation bills through reconciliation,” Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, which oversees funding for U.S. foreign policy activities, told The Epoch Times.

While passing a reconciliation bill requires the support of a mere simple majority in both houses, appropriations bills need the support of at least 60 senators to receive “cloture” and advance to final passage. This means that Republicans, who have 53 members in the Senate, will need the support of at least seven Democratic senators to pass any funding bills to avert a government shutdown—which could prove challenging to any bills with conservative attributes.

Democrats have expressed outrage at DOGE-related cancellations of contracts and spending programs and are seeking to prevent such actions through the current appropriations process.

Cole said the Democrats are asking for “things that have not traditionally been in appropriations bills.”

“That’s hard to do … the range of what [Democrats] can credibly ask for is narrower than they [think],” he said.

It is uncertain how much the appropriations package will cut spending, if at all. If a CR is adopted for the full year, it would effectively amount to a spending cut, as the previous year’s funding levels—which serve as the basis for CR funding—do not account for inflation in the current year.

The requirement for support from Democratic Party lawmakers in the Senate makes it unlikely that large spending cuts will ensue, despite demands from many fiscal conservatives in the House Republican Conference, a regular dynamic in Congress. Usually, Senate Democrats receive concessions in the final bill at the latter group’s expense.