House Republican leaders on Thursday managed to muscle through their four remaining annual spending bills for fiscal year 2026, approving some $1.2 trillion in discretionary spending for the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Education and Homeland Security.
The process once again involved some drama, but the result cemented a win for GOP leaders, who had promised a return to a regular budgeting and appropriations process and celebrated an end to Biden-era spending levels.
“Today, House Republicans completed another monumental achievement by completing Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations — without a bloated omnibus bill or another continuing resolution,” House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team said in a statement. “Together, all twelve appropriations bills provide responsible, full-year government funding, spend less than another continuing resolution, and codify reforms to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. Once enacted, any last remnants of Biden-era spending will be replaced with President Trump’s spending levels.”
Most Democrats oppose DHS funding bill: House leaders had set up a separate vote on the politically charged Homeland Security funding bill, which faced opposition from Democrats angry about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown in Minneapolis, including the fatal shooting of Renee Good earlier this month.
“We have a broken immigration system that should be fixed in a comprehensive and bipartisan manner. Democrats fought for meaningful, reasonable and necessary reforms meant to protect everyday Americans and immigrant families from the administration’s reckless and violent tactics,” House Democratic Leaders Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar said in a joint statement. “Unfortunately, House Republicans have rejected the effort to address the serious concerns raised by the American people about the lawless conduct by ICE. For this reason, we are voting No on the Homeland Security appropriations bill.”
In the end, seven Democrats broke ranks with their leadership and voted for the Homeland Security funding bill, which passed 220-207.
The House then easily passed a massive, three-bill spending package funding the Pentagon, HHS, Labor, and other departments in a 341-88 vote.
Johnson sways GOP holdouts: Republican leaders had to leave open a procedural vote on the spending bills for nearly an hour as Johnson negotiated to secure the votes of a group of conservatives that reportedly included Reps. Lauren Boebert, Andy Ogles and Zach Nunn. In the end, Boebert and Rep. Victoria Spartz flipped from no to yes, Ogles and Nunn also voted to move ahead and the test vote advanced by the narrowest of margins, 214-213.
The House also voted 427-0 to include language in the Homeland Security bill to block senators from being able to collect rich payouts if their electronic data was secretly collected as part of the federal investigation into President Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The inclusion of the provision in the DHS funding bill jams the Senate, where Republican Majority Leader John Thune has resisted undoing the measure allowing senators to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thune had included that measure in a stopgap spending bill passed last year, surprising many lawmakers.
“The one thing the House can agree on is f--- the Senate,” one Democratic source reportedly told Punchbowl News.
What’s next: The four bills passed by the House on Thursday will be packaged together with an earlier pair of spending bills and sent to the Senate, which will look to pass them as one bundle next week, ahead of a January 30 deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown.