The record-breaking government shutdown is over, but the 43-day-long impasse has left Congress with lots still to do to ensure that all federal agencies can stay open past the end of January and to address the healthcare affordability issue that Democrats put in the national spotlight.
Here’s a quick guide to two key items on lawmakers’ agenda now.
Appropriations
The bill that President Trump signed into law last night included three of the 12 annual appropriations bills Congress needs to pass. Those three — covering the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction, the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the legislative branch — were relatively uncontroversial and had bipartisan support after months of negotiations between House and Senate appropriators.
The rest of the federal government — the vast majority of it — was only funded through January at levels set under the Biden administration, meaning that the toughest appropriations battles lie ahead and the nation could even face another shutdown early in 2026. “It doesn’t help that House and Senate leaders still haven’t agreed on an overall total for fiscal 2026 spending, amid GOP divisions over how deeply to cut,” Politico’s Jennifer Scholtes, Katherine Tully-McManus and Jordain Carney wrote Thursday.
The Senate is set to take up a second funding package next week that could include as many as five of the annual spending bills. The final four bills will be the most difficult for lawmakers to agree on, given the contentious areas they cover: Energy, Homeland Security, State and Treasury, including the IRS. Republicans and Democrats agree that those most quarrelsome areas “will eventually be funded through a stopgap that spans through next September,” Politico notes.
Democrats have clear incentive to pass as many bipartisan annual appropriations bills as they can as they push back on efforts by the Trump administration and White House budget director Russell Vought to exert more control over federal spending.
“Passing full-year funding bills ensures that Congress—not Trump or Russ Vought—decides how taxpayer dollars are spent,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, said this week. “We should not turn the keys over to Trump and his Cabinet secretaries, allowing them to make unilateral cuts and to shift funding around however they please. Every day, they prove in some new way how critical it is that Congress assert its authority, and rein in their chaos.”
Healthcare
The more generous Affordable Care Act subsidies at the heart of the shutdown fight are still set to expire at the end of the year and lawmakers have little time to figure out how, or whether, they will prevent millions of American families from being hit with out-of-pocket premium payments that could more than double on average. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has promised Democrats a vote on a healthcare bill next month, though House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to do the same.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, is pushing a discharge petition that would require a vote on a three-year extension of the expiring tax credits.
Republicans oppose that plan. While some Republicans back the idea of extending the subsidies for a year, in some cases with new income caps or restrictions on abortion funding, many in the party remain adamantly against any steps to support the Obamacare program they fought for years to repeal and replace.
Still, the shutdown has forced the GOP to once again scramble to come up with a healthcare “fix” they can coalesce around and to engage in a policy debate that has burned them repeatedly in the past. Those discussions are only now getting serious, while time is running short.
“I haven’t prejudged that or put any dates on it, but I mean, we worked on it today. We’ve been working on it every day. We got more members joining the discussion,” Johnson told NBC News on Wednesday evening. “This is how it works. It’s a deliberative process, where you build out the consensus, and we’ll be working on that in earnest in the days ahead.”
For his part, Trump has embraced the vague idea of providing money directly to Americans for use in purchasing healthcare instead of subsidies for insurance plans.
“The president's idea is sort of a poorly fleshed out idea," Leighton Ku, a professor and director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, told ABC News. "Frankly, I think he was just stumbling around to say he has something to offer.”
Experts also warn that some of the Republican proposals being discussed could collapse the Affordable Care Act marketplace and leave vulnerable many of the people who were able to get coverage because of it.
“If people could use these Trump health care dollars to buy insurance not regulated by the ACA, it would likely cause the ACA to collapse and upend protections for pre-existing conditions,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan research group, told NBC News.
Republicans could still decide to try to pull together a more fleshed-out alternative to Obamacare and pass it via the budget reconciliation process that would require only a majority vote in the Senate. But there likely isn’t time for such a large-scale undertaking, and history has shown Republicans struggle to unify around Obamacare replacements.
In the end, time pressure and political considerations could still force Republicans to accept a temporary extension of the ACA subsidies rather than face voter fury in next year’s midterms. “We need to do the right thing policy-wise but also the smart thing politically,” an unnamed White House official told NBC.