The government’s funding deadline is Wednesday, and nobody in Washington is sweating it. That’s the news.
Congress got it done a month early. The Senate passed a stopgap bill 90-6, the House followed 370-48 on September 1, and Trump signed it September 2. Federal funding now runs through December 11, which happens to land well after the midterms.
Before anyone throws a parade, ask why. It isn’t because a bunch of lawmakers suddenly found religion about doing their jobs. The government has already been shut down twice in this Congress, once for 43 days last fall and once for 76 days at Homeland Security this spring, and nobody wanted to explain a third one to voters five weeks before an election. Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat who voted yes anyway, said the whole thing amounts to Republicans admitting they don’t know how to govern. He’s not wrong, though the Democrats didn’t exactly produce a full-year budget either.
A stopgap keeps spending at last year’s levels, with a few exceptions. Read that again. Nobody looks at what the money is buying. Every boondoggle, every pet project someone slipped in through a lobbyist’s favorite committee, every program that stopped working a decade ago just rolls forward on autopilot. Scrutiny is the one thing a stopgap is built to avoid.
And this is the normal way of doing business now. Congress last passed all of its regular spending bills on time in 1996, for fiscal 1997. In nearly fifty years of the current budget system it has managed that exactly four times. The rest of the time we get a patch, then a bigger patch, then a shutdown threat, then a giant omnibus bill nobody has read.
I’m fine paying taxes for roads and firefighters and libraries. I’d even say I’m happy to. What drives me nuts is a process that funds everything by default because a hard vote is bad for the campaign. The fights everyone remembers, the 43-day one included, were never about whether the spending was any good. They were about leverage and who blinked first.
So yes, the lights stay on, and I’ll take that over the alternative. But December 11 is coming, right in the middle of holiday travel season, and the same people who couldn’t pass a budget in the summer will be back at the same table with less time and no election to hide behind.
My two cents: a government that can only avoid a shutdown by ducking voters until after the election isn’t governing, it’s stalling with a good vote count.
Photo by Martin Kraft via Openverse, licensed CC BY-SA.