How Congress Writes Twelve Spending Bills, and Why It So Often Fails

For three months in 1976, the United States government had a fiscal year that was not a year. It ran from July 1 to September 30 and was officially called the transition quarter, and budget tables still carry it as its own odd column, a stray quarter wedged between two full years. It existed because of a law Richard Nixon signed in July 1974, a few weeks before he resigned: the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. Among many other things, the law moved the start of the federal fiscal year from July 1 to October 1, on the theory that Congress needed three more months to finish its spending bills on time. Congress has had those extra months for half a century. It has finished all of its regular appropriations bills by October 1 only four times, and the most recent was for the fiscal year that began in 1996.

In short: Each year Congress is supposed to pass twelve appropriations bills, written by twelve pairs of subcommittees, before the fiscal year begins on October 1. It almost never does, and instead relies on stopgap continuing resolutions, giant omnibus bills and, at worst, shutdowns. The reasons are partly procedural and partly political, and the fixes are known, if hard.

The law that tried to take back the purse

The 1974 Budget Act was a response to a fight about power. Nixon had used a practice called impoundment, refusing to spend money Congress had appropriated for programs he disliked, on a scale earlier presidents had not. Congress was furious, and cities, states and other groups that lost money took the administration to court. The Budget Act was Congress's answer, and it had two halves.

The first half, the Impoundment Control Act, says that if a president wants to cancel spending Congress has approved, he must ask Congress, which has a limited window to agree. If it does not, the money must be spent. The point was to restore Congress's power of the purse, which the Constitution gives it in plain words: no money may be drawn from the Treasury except under appropriations made by law.

The second half built the modern budget process. It created the House and Senate Budget Committees and the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that estimates what legislation will cost. It set up an annual budget resolution, a blueprint in which Congress sets total spending and revenue levels. It created the reconciliation process for adjusting taxes and mandatory spending. And it moved the fiscal year to October 1.

That half-century-old law is back at the center of fights in Washington. In 2025, the Government Accountability Office, Congress's own watchdog, found that the Trump administration had violated the Impoundment Control Act by withholding funds Congress had appropriated, in more than one case. The administration's lawyers have argued that the law is unconstitutional to the extent it constrains a president's control over spending, a position some conservative legal scholars have long held. The question of whether Congress's appropriations are binding orders or spending ceilings is one of the most consequential in American government, and it is the backdrop for every spending bill the new Congress will write.

The twelve bills and the people who write them

Federal spending comes in two kinds. Mandatory spending, which includes Social Security, Medicare and most of Medicaid, flows automatically under permanent laws; it does not need an annual vote. Discretionary spending, which covers nearly everything else the government runs year to year, from the military and the national parks to the FBI, the weather service and federal grants for schools, must be appropriated each year. Discretionary spending is a minority of the total, but it funds most of what people think of as the day-to-day government.

That annual money moves through the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate, which are each divided into twelve subcommittees. Each subcommittee writes one bill covering a set of agencies. The twelve are, roughly: agriculture and food safety; commerce, justice and science; defense; energy and water; financial services and general government; homeland security; interior and environment; labor, health and human services and education; the legislative branch; military construction and veterans affairs; state and foreign operations; and transportation and housing.

The subcommittees are where much of the real work happens. Their staff spend months going through agency budget requests, holding hearings with agency heads and writing bills and reports that tell agencies, in detail, what the money is for. The members who sit on them, in both parties, often know more about their agencies than anyone else in Congress, and the subcommittees have historically been among the more bipartisan corners of the Capitol. Appropriators, as they are called, share an interest in getting bills done, whatever their party.

How the process is supposed to run

On paper, the process unfolds on a calendar that begins well before October.

1. The president's budget. By law, the president sends a budget request to Congress in early February. It is a proposal, not a command, but it gives committees a starting point.
2. The budget resolution. The Budget Committees write a resolution setting total spending levels. Congress is supposed to adopt it by April 15. It does not go to the president, because it is an internal plan.
3. The allocations. The total for discretionary spending, known by its section number in the Budget Act as the 302(a) allocation, is handed to the Appropriations Committees. Each committee then divides it among its twelve subcommittees; those are the 302(b) allocations.
4. Subcommittee and committee markups. Each subcommittee writes its bill within its allocation. The full committee amends and approves it.
5. Floor votes. Each chamber passes its twelve bills, ideally one at a time.
6. Conference. The House and Senate resolve differences between their versions and send each final bill to the president.
7. Signature by October 1. The fiscal year begins.

Every step on this list routinely slips. Budget resolutions are often never adopted at all, in which case Congress uses other means to set the spending cap. Bills are marked up in committee but never reach the floor. The Senate, where most bills need sixty votes to advance, may take up few or none of the twelve individually. By September, the process has usually collapsed into a negotiation among a handful of leaders.

The stopgaps, the omnibus and the shutdowns

When October 1 arrives and the bills are not done, Congress has three options.

The first and most common is a continuing resolution, a stopgap that keeps agencies running at roughly the previous year's funding levels for a set period. Continuing resolutions have become so routine that many agencies plan their year around them, delaying hiring and contracts until the real numbers arrive. Defense officials, in particular, complain that stopgaps prevent new programs from starting and waste money. Sometimes Congress passes several in a row; sometimes it passes a full-year continuing resolution, freezing an agency's budget for an entire year.

The second is an omnibus, a single bill that combines all twelve appropriations, or most of them, into one enormous package. Omnibus bills often pass in December, months into the fiscal year, after leaders negotiate them in private. They can run to thousands of pages, and members have little time to read them before voting. Bills that combine only a few of the twelve are sometimes called minibuses.

The third is a shutdown. Under the Antideficiency Act, an old law that forbids spending money Congress has not appropriated, agencies without funding must stop all but essential work. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued opinions in 1980 and 1981 that interpreted the law strictly, and since then a lapse in funding has meant a shutdown, with federal employees furloughed or working without pay. The government shut down for sixteen days in 2013 and for thirty-five days across 2018 and 2019. The shutdown that began on October 1, 2025, ran longer than any before it.

Why it fails so often

Several forces push the process off the rails, and it helps to name them separately.

The calendar is short and crowded. Congress spends much of its year on other priorities, and an election year cuts the fall session short. Twelve bills, each with dozens of contested provisions, need floor time that leaders rarely give them.

Spending bills became the main vehicle for everything else. Because appropriations must pass, members attach riders, policy provisions that have nothing to do with money, on abortion, guns, environmental rules, immigration and more. Each rider is a fight, and some are deal-breakers for the other side.

The Senate filibuster raises the bar. In most years, neither party has sixty votes in the Senate. That means every spending bill must win some votes from the minority, which gives the minority leverage and gives the majority an incentive to bundle bills together so that one vote can carry all of them.

Divided government and brinkmanship. When the House, Senate and presidency are not held by the same party, each side can use the October 1 deadline as leverage. A shutdown or the threat of one becomes a tool for winning concessions, which encourages both sides to wait until the last moment.

Leaders find omnibus bills useful. Here is the uncomfortable part. Big end-of-year packages let leaders trade priorities across bills, protect members from tough votes on individual programs and pass things that might fail on their own. The process that rank-and-file members complain about is, in some ways, the process leaders prefer.

There is a progressive critique and a conservative critique of this system, and they overlap more than either side usually admits. Conservatives say the omnibus habit lets spending grow with little scrutiny. Progressives say stopgaps freeze priorities that need to change, starve programs of predictable funding and hand leverage to anyone willing to threaten a shutdown. Both want regular order, the twelve bills passed one at a time, and both have struggled to deliver it when they held power.

Earmarks, and what members get out of the bills

One more piece of the system explains why appropriators fight so hard to keep their bills alive. For most of the twentieth century, members could direct some spending to specific projects in their districts, a bridge, a research lab, a water system, through provisions known as earmarks. After a series of scandals, House Republicans banned the practice when they took the majority in 2011, and it stayed banned for a decade. In 2021, Democrats brought it back in a revised form, called community project funding in the House, with new rules requiring members to post their requests publicly and certify that they have no financial interest in them. Republicans kept a version of the practice when they returned to the majority.

Earmarks are easy to mock, and some have deserved it. They also give individual members a stake in passing the spending bills, which is part of why the bills used to move more reliably. Here is a trade-off a new majority has to weigh honestly: a little local spending, disclosed in public, may be a reasonable price for a process that actually works.

What a new majority could change

Democrats won the House and the Senate on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress takes office on January 3, 2027, with Donald Trump in the White House. The first spending fight of the new majority will begin almost immediately, because the next fiscal year starts on October 1, 2027, and the president can veto any appropriations bill he dislikes. A few reforms have attracted support across party lines in recent years, and a new majority could try them.

One is a law that would automatically continue funding at existing levels if Congress misses the deadline, preventing shutdowns while keeping pressure on to finish the real bills. Versions of that idea have been proposed by members of both parties; critics say it would remove the deadline's urgency and lock in existing priorities.

Another is a shift to two-year budgets, which would let Congress set spending for two years at a time and spend the off years on oversight. Several states budget this way. Critics argue that two-year budgets make it harder to respond to new needs, and that Congress would still miss the deadline, just less often.

A third is simpler and depends more on will than on law: actually holding floor votes on all twelve bills in the House, early enough in the year that the Senate has time to act. Under a president of the other party, that would not guarantee the bills become law. It would put the majority's priorities on the record, bill by bill, and make every later compromise visible.

Here's the argument I'd make. For progressives, the spending process is not a technical sideshow. It is where the actual size of Head Start, the number of inspectors at food plants, the staffing of Social Security offices and the funding for climate programs gets decided. A majority that cares about those things has to care about the plumbing that delivers them.

What you can do

• See where the money goes in your area. Federal spending shows up in the agencies near you. The climate page tracks clean power and the US power mix by state, and our topic page on government cuts follows the agencies and programs that lost staff or funding since 2025.
• Tell your representative which programs you rely on. The representative finder lists your House member, senators and state legislators, with phone numbers and contact forms. Appropriations staff count constituent requests for specific programs.
• Comment on how agencies spend. Some spending decisions are carried out through rules. Agencies that receive the money often decide how to use it through formal rules, and on the comment page you can see which of those rules are open to the public right now, sorted by the nearest deadline and grouped by issue, alongside advice on writing an effective comment.
• Follow the spending votes. The politics page tracks Congress's votes and bills, including continuing resolutions, so you can see how each member votes when the deadline arrives.

Half a century after the transition quarter, the October 1 deadline still arrives every year, and Congress still usually misses it. The problem is not that nobody knows how to fix the process. It is that fixing it requires leaders to give up some of the leverage that a broken process gives them.