How the US government maintains funding and why shutdowns are a common threat

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This drama should seem familiar:

► The deadline for passing a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown is approaching.

► Former President Donald Trump is urging Republicans to support a government shutdown if they fail to convince Democrats to add a controversial immigration provision to a spending bill — this time, one that involves allowing non-citizens to vote.

►Republicans do not have enough votes to carry out Trump’s order in the House of Representatives, where they have a majority, much less in the Senate, where Democrats control.

Variations of this pattern have repeated themselves throughout the numerous funding fights, to the point that most Americans have likely lost sight of the possibility of a government shutdown. This serious threat hasn’t loomed since Trump was in the White House and Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate.

Find out what CNN’s Capitol Hill crew has to say.

Putting all this aside, it is worth considering for a moment why the funding process allows for the threat of a government shutdown every year, and sometimes even multiple times a year.

The Constitution requires that the government spend only money from “appropriations by law.” Bills must pass both the House and Senate and be signed by the president. But we’re talking big money—$1.7 trillion in annual discretionary spending in the last fiscal year.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate divide government funding into 12 different appropriations bills. Committees in the House and Senate work on appropriations bills.

Then the full House and Senate are to consider the bills in turn, reconcile their differences, and send a final product to the president. That work is expected to be completed by September 30, since the government’s fiscal year begins October 1.

Zero.

The House, to its credit, passed the preliminary versions of five of the 12 budget bills. The Senate passed none, so none of the budget bills came close to being signed into law.

That’s not to say that lawmakers haven’t done any work on the spending bills. The appropriations committees in both the House and Senate have passed versions of all but one of the bills, and the versions that passed in the Senate committees passed with some bipartisan support. Even if the appropriations bills don’t pass, the work of these committees could ultimately be reflected in the spending bills that do pass.

Years have passed.

Lawmakers haven’t passed a single budget bill on time and sent it to the president’s desk since 2019, when they sent five. That’s the same year that saw the last partial government shutdown, by the way.

Fiscal 2019 was an anomaly. Lawmakers routinely fail to pass any budget bills. In the years leading up to 2019, lawmakers passed one budget bill on time in 2017 and one in 2010.

In previous decades, they routinely passed several budget bills, but over the nearly half-century that the process has lasted, they have actually completed the job only in four years: 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997. In only one other year have they managed to pass more than half of the budget bills.

Lawmakers pass a temporary funding bill, known as a “continuing resolution” or CR. Sometimes referred to as “temporary” appropriations, these bills keep the government running until all the money can be put into a massive omnibus bill that is passed months into the fiscal year.

Ongoing resolutions usually just buy time. Instead of implementing funding for the new year, they simply extend funding from the previous year. That’s better than a funding gap, but it’s certainly not the most efficient way to run a large government.

A 2022 Government Accountability Office report exposed inefficiencies in the process, but it also found that the federal bureaucracy is accustomed to the uncertainty built into the system.

But there’s another element to consider. Increasingly, CR considerations come at the last minute, amid concerns about a government shutdown or lack of funding, such as the one Trump suggested Republicans use to force consideration of their bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.

The distraction of scheduling a shutdown year after year is a serious inefficiency. House Speaker Mike Johnson, according to CNN’s Capitol Hill team, said he believes Trump now understands Republicans don’t have the votes to make it happen, but Trump has not supported simply extending the funding.

Similarly, when lawmakers come to a big omnibus bill that combines measures, they are often asked to vote days after introducing these massive bills. The last minute is part of what puts pressure on them to get things done.

Almost every year. The current budget process has been in place since the late 1970s. Of those 47 fiscal years, there was at least one CR in all but three fiscal years. The last fiscal year without a CR was 1997, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The ongoing resolutions are essentially part of the process at this point. Many of the numbers in this story come from the CRS report.

They can be set for as short as a day or for much longer. It depends on the year and the politics of the day.

The CRS report averaged 200 continuing resolutions that have been introduced 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. In some years, Congress does not go from CR to CR until late spring.

For the last fiscal year, which was to have begun last October, President Joe Biden did not sign the full-year funding bill until late March.

There is a lot of politicking surrounding these spending bills every year.

It was the stalemate over last year’s spending bill that cost former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job. His willingness to pass a short-term funding bill — the CR — with Democratic help sparked a revolt from some hardline Republicans, even as his ouster frustrated most GOP lawmakers.

It took Republicans several days to elect Johnson.

Johnson eventually produced a similar spending plan to the one McCarthy had been working on, but not before numerous additional CRs had made it possible for the government to function.

He needed Democrats to keep the government open. Johnson will almost certainly need Democratic help again this year after Trump encouraged Republicans to pass a shutdown without an additional voting bill.

The term “shutdown” is also a bit of a misnomer. Funding disruptions are a bad way to do business and can delay paychecks for federal workers and temporarily shut down some government services. But recent shutdowns have affected only parts of the government and are usually short-lived.

The 2018-2019 partial shutdown, the longest on record and lasting five weeks, did not affect all federal departments and reduced economic output by $11 billion, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.

The closures could also have real political consequences. Senator Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate minority leader, is among Republicans warning that a closure just before the November election would be a very bad idea.