Congress Passes Yet Another Stopgap Bill To Avert Government Shutdown

When the House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday continuing to fund the government at its current levels, it marked the fourth time in this cycle that Congress has bought itself more time to pass a budget instead of actually passing the budget.

For a budget to pass the entire Congress, it must get a nod from Democrats, who control the Senate, and Republicans who have the majority in the House of Representatives. Leaders in the two chambers have agreed to a compromise, setting a spending limit. Still, they have yet to hammer out the details of how that money will be distributed.

Instead of compromising, both sides have preferred to kick the can down the road, passing “continuing resolution” (CR) bills that buy lawmakers more time. Should lawmakers fail to meet the new deadlines they’ve set—March 8 for certain agencies, and March 22 for others—government agencies will begin to shut down.1

Standoffs under the threat of an economically damaging government shutdown have become the norm in recent years. The Budget Act of 1974 sets a clear schedule, in which the appropriations bills that make up the federal budget should be passed by the beginning of the fiscal year in October.

However, it hardly ever works out that way. The bills have been on time only four times since 1977, most recently in 1997, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit research organization.2

As the Congressional Research Service noted in a report earlier this year, “Recent practice has often been for Congress to enact an initial CR that lasts until November or December and then extend this period through subsequent CRs until final action on enacting regular appropriations bills occurs at some point between December and May.”3

So far, the latest in the year a budget has passed was May—seven months after the deadline—back in 2017.