The Senate is entering a critical week in this year’s government funding fight, with the House gone for the next month and partisan rifts threatening to derail the entire process.
Senate appropriators will mark up their next two fiscal 2026 bills — Defense and Labor-Health and Human Services-Education — and try to pass their first package of funding measures on the floor before their scheduled August recess.
That bundle of Senate bills could include Military Construction-Veterans Affairs, Agriculture-FDA and Commerce-Justice-Science, according to the latest proposal from Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine).
As the Sept. 30 funding deadline quickly approaches, both House and Senate appropriators are finding themselves far behind, and they are increasingly confronting the all-but-certain reality that Congress will need to rely on a politically tricky extension to avoid a funding lapse.
