The House and Senate will both return to regular session this week for the first time since mid-September, kicking off a legislative sprint to catch up on delayed work and prevent another costly shutdown.
The first order of business for congressional leaders will be to maintain momentum on fiscal 2026 spending. Congress has 11 weeks to pass the remaining nine funding bills, and appropriators remain far apart on top lines and policy riders.
At the same time, lawmakers will rev up committee work — including on energy and environment priorities — following the House’s extended recess.
Republican and Democratic leaders are particularly hoping to make up ground on permitting reform legislation. There could be a markup vote in the coming days.
“We have a lot of business to do, as you all know, and we will be working in earnest,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said last week. “There will be long days and long nights here for the foreseeable future to make up for all this lost time that was imposed upon us.”
The shutdown and Johnson’s decision to keep House members in their districts for most of the past two months have created a pileup of pending legislation. Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) said last week that of all the bills that have advanced out of committee this year, 150 are awaiting potential floor votes.
“These people have been missing in action, absent without official leave, running scared. But they can no longer hide,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
The House is poised to vote on a resolution to compel the release of documents associated with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There could also be votes on legislation focused on lawmaker stock trading, cryptocurrency and other issues.
In December, the Senate will vote on a Democratic-backed bill to extend soon-to-expire premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act.
Some Republican leaders have floated the potential for a second reconciliation bill, which would allow the majority to pass certain health care policies without Democratic buy-in.
Meanwhile, Armed Services Committee leaders are negotiating the annual defense policy bill with the goal of voting on a compromise version in December. The House and Senate versions of the National Defense Authorization Act lean heavily into advanced nuclear energy and environmental cleanups.
Congress will look to make headway on various bipartisan packages that the shutdown stalled, including a bill to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency and legislation to reauthorize pipeline safety programs. A bipartisan highway bill is also in the works.
Funding fights
It took the House and Senate more than three months to negotiate the package of three fiscal 2026 spending bills that Congress passed last week as part of the deal to reopen the government.
Now, Congress will race to pass nine more spending bills before government funding runs out Jan. 31. Senate leaders have already lined up a package of at least three more bills for bipartisan, bicameral negotiations: Defense, Labor-HHS-Education and Transportation-HUD.
Two more spending bills — Interior-Environment and Commerce-Justice-Science — are also in the mix, but those have been mired by appropriators’ disagreements about policy riders and funding levels. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) has objections about top lines in the bill that funds the Department of the Interior and EPA.
Lawmakers are eager to avoid another shutdown, but Democrats have not telegraphed how they might respond if appropriations bills don’t pass on time, if the Trump administration continues its unilateral funding cuts or if the health care issue is not resolved.
“We’re going to try to take that weapon out of their hand,” Johnson said Friday on Fox Business, referring to Democrats’ recent attempt to use a shutdown for leverage.
“What I mean by that is over these next several intense days, these next couple months, we’ll be working around the clock to make sure we get more of these appropriations bills through the process,” Johnson said.
Lawmakers have their work cut out for them. The House has not passed most of its fiscal 2026 bills on the floor. The Senate is even further behind; the chamber has yet to release and mark up four of its spending bills.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chair of the Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, said he expects his bill to hit the House floor for a vote as soon as this week. From there, it would enter informal negotiations with Senate appropriators.
“We need to move on ours so we can go to conference,” Simpson said. “There’s always differences, and that’s OK. That’s what conferences are all about.”
The Energy-Water bill remains stuck. It passed the House by one vote earlier this year, but the Senate has not yet finalized its own version.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Kennedy, the chair of the Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee, are at an impasse over funding levels in the bill. Kennedy wants his bill to reduce spending on renewable energy and other programs while maintaining funding for the Army Corps of Engineers and the nuclear stockpile.
Kennedy has said his version of the bill has a discretionary top line 1 percent below the currently enacted level and is ready for a markup. However, committee leaders have not released it.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member on the Energy-Water Subcommittee, indicated that the dispute over the bill’s top line had been elevated to Collins. Murray said she is “waiting for Sen. Collins to do something” about it. A spokesperson for Collins said they did not have an update on the bill’s status.
“I’m going with my bill, and if the Appropriations Committee or the chairwoman or the vice chairwoman don’t like it, I respect their opinion, but they got one vote and I got one vote, and mine is the only bill that reduces spending,” Kennedy said.
“I know that is a new experience for everybody on the committee,” he added, “but I’m not backing down, and that’s kind of where I am.”
Permitting reform
One discussion that didn’t grind to a halt even as the government shuttered? Permitting.
As the longest government shutdown in history delayed much legislative progress, lawmakers in both chambers continued to meet with each other and with energy industry and tech lobbyists who have showed up to the Capitol to press members to advance legislation intended to boost energy supply.
“The shutdown has given us a lot of time to review the legislation, to work with other members,” House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) said last week just before voting to end the shutdown. “I think we’re really tying the legislation up and have a real high-quality piece of legislation.”
He’s gearing up to hold a markup as early as this week on his bipartisan bill, H.R. 4776, the “Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act,” to amend the National Environmental Policy Act process to set firmer deadlines and reduce the judicial review period.
Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) is a co-sponsor, and Westerman said their teams are taking input from other committee Democrats who “had some issues.”
Across the Capitol, key senators have been trading draft proposals on a larger package that — to get Democratic buy-in — would include transmission infrastructure, a net reduction in emissions and safeguards for permitted projects. Democrats are also demanding that the Trump administration must stop attacking clean energy projects.
But Westerman does not necessarily see the “SPEED Act” as part of a bipartisan trade, and he was not eager to talk about transmission, saying it’s not part of his committee’s jurisdiction.
“I’m not pushing for that,” he said. “What I’m pushing for is to keep the SPEED Act clean. Because if we start tacking stuff onto it, the line would be across the Capitol from people who want carve-outs.”
At the same time, he acknowledged any piece of legislation could grow in order to get it on the president’s desk.
“I think what people have to realize is NEPA reform helps everything,” he said. “It helps electrical transmission. It helps pipelines. It helps traditional energy sources. It helps new energy sources. It helps transportation and infrastructure projects. So if all we pass — and I hate to say if all — but if only NEPA passes, everybody wins.”
NDAA nearing completion
House and Senate negotiators are getting close to finalizing the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. It is likely to carry a number of provisions on nuclear energy, critical minerals and environmental cleanups.
Armed Services Committee leaders plan to unveil a compromise NDAA by Thanksgiving, with the goal of having the House and Senate vote on it by mid-December.
There are some differences between the bills, but lawmakers involved say they are not far from a final deal. They have been working on bridging the $32 billion gulf between the House and Senate bills’ funding authorizations and will likely remove most of the culture-war provisions House lawmakers added to their version.
“We’re in a better position on this NDAA than we have been for the last two or three years, as far as the narrow number of issues that were still outstanding,” House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) told reporters Wednesday.
Negotiators are having to sort out differences on energy and environment policies. For example, in October, the Senate added a major nuclear energy bill to its version, as well as language to crack down on illegal fishing and to expand efforts to map reserves of critical minerals and rare earth elements.
The Senate bill includes a bipartisan housing bill that contains a number of provisions on environmental reviews and disaster recovery.
Both bills have similar language promoting the Pentagon’s embrace of advanced nuclear energy. They would require the Department of Defense to establish advanced nuclear energy working groups.
They also contain provisions dedicated to promoting resilience on military installations and addressing contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
Reconciliation 2.0?
President Donald Trump earlier this month called on Senate Republicans to scrap the legislative filibuster in order to reopen the government without Democratic votes. While Republican leaders opted not to take that route, there is some interest in finding other ways to get around Democratic opposition.
Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he is meeting with other Republicans about the possibility of passing a second reconciliation bill this Congress, following up on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“I want us to look at what a reconciliation package, a new one, would look like,” Graham told POLITICO earlier this month. “We could do some things on health care. We can do some things on policy, taxes and spending.”
The GOP accomplished much of its legislative agenda with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A second party-line bill would take up a significant amount of committee time and energy, and many Republicans are not eager to do it all again.
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told POLITICO’s E&E News earlier this year that he does not think there are many energy-related policies left to pursue in a potential second reconciliation bill. Other committee leaders also cast doubt on using reconciliation to pass more energy and natural resources policies.
Westerman said earlier this year that he had been having discussions to prepare for another effort, but his committee has not produced any formal proposals.
Reporters Connor O’Brien and Jordain Carney contributed.
