Given news reporting about Republicans causing a government shutdown at the end of the month as a Trump election strategy, I decided to check the progress on passing appropriation bills for FY25.

Progress on annual appropriation bills is tracked by the Congressional Research Service.

Republican controlled House: all 12 bills have passed committee, 5 bills have passed on floor votes, 1 bill failed floor vote.

Democrat controlled Senate: 11 of 12 bills have passed committee (this is surprisingly good progress for Senate by historical standards), 0 bills have had a floor vote.

As usual the fake news is partisan propaganda instead of facts. While the Senate is better than the past, it is behind the House in progress as is its norm.

The 12 appropriation bills are:
• Agriculture
• Commerce-Justice-Science
• Defense
• Energy-Water
• Financial Services
• Homeland Security
• Interior-Environment
• Labor-HHS-Education
• Legislative Affairs
• Military Construction-Veteran Affairs
• State-Foreign Operations
• Transportation-HUD

The official process is for the House and Senate to create separate bills based on spending levels set in the prior budget resolutions. First, the appropriation bills must pass the assigned subcommittee before approval of the full appropriation committee. Next, each chamber will vote on their version of each appropriation bill separately. As there will be differences between each chambers’ bill, a joint conference committee will resolve the differences by negotiation. After, each chamber votes on the reconciled bill. If passed by both houses, then the appropriation bill is sent to the president for signature. Each of the 12 appropriation bills would complete the same process separately.

This official process is broken as party leadership in the Senate generally refuses to vote on individual appropriation bills.

Why isn’t the official process followed? Democrats seek to create an appropriations crisis and government shutdown to increase domestic discretionary spending by offsetting cuts to defense spending. If the Senate allowed separate bills to pass they could not rob one to pay another.

Why continue the pretense of committee work? The committees do work out details and special exceptions. More importantly to the politicians, the committee work helps the parties raise campaign contributions.

Thus instead of following the official process we are in the publicly hated process of continuing resolutions, omnibus bills, and government shutdown crisis as Congress’ chosen means of funding government programs.