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CNN —
The current drama should feel very familiar.
► A deadline is looming to pass a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown.
► Former President Donald Trump is urging Republicans to accept a government shutdown if Democrats can’t agree to add controversial immigration language — this time about foreign nationals voting — to a spending bill.
►Republicans do not have the votes to carry out President Trump’s orders in the House of Representatives, where they hold a Republican majority, much less in the Senate, where Democrats hold a Democratic majority.
Variations on this pattern have been repeated throughout multiple funding fights, to the point that most Americans probably cringe when they hear talk of a possible government shutdown — a line of threats that hasn’t happened since Trump was in the White House and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.
Get the latest updates on the current situation from CNN’s Capitol Hill team.
Putting all this aside, it’s worth considering for a moment why the funding process allows for the threat of a government shutdown every year, sometimes multiple times in a single year.
The Constitution requires that the government spend only money it receives from “legal appropriations,” which must be passed by both the House and the Senate and signed by the president. But that’s a lot of money: In the most recent fiscal year, annual discretionary spending totaled $1.7 trillion.
House and Senate lawmakers divide government funding into 12 different budget bills. Committees in the House and Senate work to draft the budget bills.
The full House and Senate will then take turns considering these bills, ironing out differences and sending a final version to the president, a process that is expected to be completed by September 30, as the government’s fiscal year begins on October 1.
zero.
The House deserves credit for passing initial versions of five of the 12 spending bills, while the Senate failed to pass any, meaning none of the spending bills are close to being signed into law.
That doesn’t mean lawmakers haven’t worked on spending bills at all. The House and Senate Appropriations committees passed all but one of the bills. All of the bills that passed the Senate committee passed with bipartisan support. Even if the spending bills don’t pass, the work of these committees could find its way into the spending bill that ultimately gets passed.
Many years have passed.
Lawmakers have not passed a single budget on time since passing five budgets on time and sending them to the president’s desk in 2019, the same year as the most recent partial government shutdown.
Fiscal year 2019 was an unusual year, as lawmakers routinely failed to pass any budgets at all. In the years leading up to 2019, lawmakers had passed just one budget on time in 2017 and just one in 2010.
In previous decades, governments had periodically passed some budget bills, but almost half a century after the process was introduced, the work was actually completed only in four years: 1977, 1989, 1995 and 1997. In only one other year did the government manage to pass more than half of the budget bills.
Lawmakers pass temporary funding bills called “Continuing Resolutions,” or CRs. These bills are sometimes called “Band-Aid” measures. Often, these bills are meant to keep the government running until all funding can be combined into a larger omnibus bill that is passed a few months after the fiscal year begins.
Continuing resolutions usually just buy time. They simply extend funding from the previous year rather than providing new funding for the new year. While better than running out of money, it’s not the most efficient way to run a large government.
A 2022 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office cited inefficiencies in the process but also found that the federal bureaucracy has grown accustomed to the uncertainty built into the system.
But there’s another factor to consider: CR considerations are increasingly coming at the last minute, along with fears of a government shutdown or funding shortfalls, which Trump has suggested he accepts in order to force Republicans to consider a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Planning for a government shutdown every year would lead to huge inefficiencies. According to CNN’s Capitol Hill team, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he believes President Trump understands Republicans don’t have the votes to shut down the government, but President Trump doesn’t support a simple budget extension.
Similarly, when lawmakers start working on big omnibus spending bills, they often are asked to vote on those huge bills days after they’re introduced, putting pressure on lawmakers to get things done.
Nearly every year. The current budget process has been in place since the late 1970s. In the last 47 fiscal years, there has been at least one CR in all but three. According to the Congressional Research Service, the most recent fiscal year without a CR was 1997.
At this point, continuing resolutions are essentially part of the process. Many of the figures in this article are taken from the CRS report.
They may be in force for just one day, or for longer, depending on the year and the political situation on that day.
The CRS report took an average of 200 continuing resolutions enacted since fiscal year 1977 and found that CRs fund all or part of the government for an average of 137 days, or about one-third of the year.Some years, Congress swings from CR to CR well into the spring.
For the most recent fiscal year, which was supposed to have begun last October, President Joe Biden did not sign a one-year budget bill until late March.
There’s a lot of political maneuvering that goes on over these spending bills every year.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost his job last year over a dispute over a spending bill, after his efforts to pass a cash bill with Democratic support drew backlash from some hardline Republicans, even as he disappointed most Republicans.
It took Republicans days to choose Johnson.
Johnson eventually worked out a spending deal similar to the one McCarthy had been working on, but before that several extra CRs had kept the government running.
Johnson needed Democratic cooperation to continue the government shutdown, and he is almost certain to need it again this year after President Trump urged Republicans to accept a government shutdown without a follow-up vote bill.
Even the term “shutdown” is somewhat of a misnomer: Running out of funds is bad for business, it can delay paychecks for federal employees, and it can temporarily halt some government services, but recent shutdowns have only affected parts of the government and have usually been short-lived.
The 2018-2019 partial government shutdown was the longest on record, lasting five weeks, but did not affect all federal departments and agencies and reduced economic output by $11 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
A government shutdown could have real political ramifications: Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is among the Republicans who have warned that shutting down the government so close to the November election would be a very bad idea.
