House Republican leaders kicked off a government funding fight on Friday — or at least dared Democrats to start one. The GOP leaders released the text of a bill that would extend federal funding until December 4 and avert the threat of an election-season government shutdown when current funding expires at the end of September.
Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that he plans a floor vote on the stopgap funding measure next week.
After partisan funding fights resulted in two record-long shutdowns in the current fiscal year, the annual appropriations process for 2027 has been bogged down by partisan differences over defense and non-defense spending levels. The House Appropriations Committee has advanced all 12 annual spending bills, and the full House has passed three of those bills. But action in the Senate has stalled as Republicans and Democrats clash over the Trump administration’s push for a massive boost taking defense funding to $1.5 trillion and Democratic demands for non-defense spending.
House Republicans say that their bill does not include any “poison pills” and would simply preempt a partisan fight and prevent another painful shutdown. The text does not include the SAVE America Act, the partisan election overhaul that is President Trump’s top legislative priority. At the same time, the bill does not include any of the immigration-enforcement reforms that Democrats have demanded before they will provide funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The September deadline isn't changing, but how Congress plans for it can,” Republican Rep. Tom Cole, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “This bill takes partisan politics and posturing off the table, denying anyone the opportunity to manufacture leverage from the calendar before elections.”
Some Republicans have predicted for months that Democrats will want a shutdown as they wait to see if they can win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections and thereby gain more leverage over 2027 spending decisions.
“Let's see who actually does want to shut the government down and inflict pain on the American people, which would be a bad thing,” Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said.
What’s next: With an August recess looming, lawmakers have little time left in session before the new fiscal year starts on October 1. It’s not clear yet how a fall funding fight might play out given the competing priorities and agendas of Republicans, Democrats and Trump.
But Johnson may be lining up another play if the stopgap bill fails.
“An early defeat on a continuing resolution would give Johnson a pretext to shoehorn a spending stopgap bill into a September reconciliation package,” Kate Santaliz and Hans Nichols report at Axios. They suggest that pairing a short-term spending bill with the GOP’s $95 billion reconciliation package would both make it harder for House Republicans to vote against the legislation and “present the Senate with a take-it-or-leave-it choice: accept the House reconciliation bill or share the blame for a government shutdown.”