The Senate’s Bipartisan Budget Blitz

A new stopgap funding bill is born. After months of arguing over federal spending, lawmakers in the Senate put aside their disagreements and bickering to knock out a bipartisan budget blitz. The new continuing resolution passed the filibuster cloture vote 89-4 and will likely clear the upper chamber later today. But then, of course, it still has to pass the House – which isn’t expected back from recess until August 31.

The Senate Gets Serious

On Monday, August 3, the US Senate finally decided it was time to get serious about next year’s budget. But it’s already August, and funding expires at the end of September. Rather than accept the continuing resolution already passed by the House – a clean bill essentially free of policy riders that would keep the government afloat through December 4 – senators decided to come up with their own.

So, what was so bad about the House version that the Senate had to ignore it and make its own? Ironically, the biggest trouble seemed to be that it was, in fact, a clean CR – no big push for the SAVE America Act or any other Republican measure Democrats can’t get behind that one might expect from the current House layout.

But the Democrats don’t want a clean spending bill; they want “assurances.”

The House CR maintained the current year’s funding levels through December 4, without exception, and it includes no policy riders. The Senate version is a bit more complicated – and likely not in a way President Donald Trump or Freedom Caucus Republicans in the House are going to like. It extends the funding through December 11, which buys a little more time to negotiate full-year funding after the midterms.

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It also allows for “emergency anomalies.” These are targeted funding increases to prevent systematic shortfalls. The Senate version carves out extra emergency spending for nutrition assistance, disaster relief, and housing aid – but it also blocks the $1 billion emergency request by the White House to begin development of the Trump-Class battleships.

The Senate version also explicitly prohibits the Trump administration from transferring funds away from other domestic programs into border patrol and blocks a proposed rule from the OMB that would allow Cabinet members to cancel or approve federal grants.

Other than the extended expiration date, just about everything added in the Senate version that’s missing from the House’s clean CR is decidedly anti-Trump. This was, apparently, good enough to pass muster in the upper chamber. Monday’s cloture vote was impressively bipartisan. Only four senators opposed it: Tim Kaine (D-VA), Rand Paul (R-KY), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).   

But will the House GOP be so willing to clear it – and will Trump sign it if they do? That will all depend on how much the president is willing to let go.  

The Budget Blitz and the Big Delay: Hurry Up and Wait

Of course, as to whether the House or the president will accept this compromise won’t be determined until the House returns from recess on August 31! And by the time they’re back, the Senate will be gone. So it becomes something of a game of hurry up and wait: The Senate held his budget blitz yesterday, and while there isn’t an official roll call vote on the schedule, it seems likely they’ll hold that final vote today.

But the CR can’t go on to be law until the House passes it – if they pass it – and unless lawmakers agree to do so during one of the pro forma sessions coming up soon, that’ll have to wait until August 31. The Senate, of course, leaves for its August recess this Friday, August 7, and won’t be back until September 14.

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Two weeks – that’s all this schedule leaves the two chambers to reconcile any differences. Two weeks of shared session time before the close of fiscal year 2026 is all that remains to avoid a government shutdown. And it’s an election year – so both chambers will once again leave Washington once October arrives, not to return until after the midterms sometime in mid-November.