Senate Leaders Cut a Deal to Keep the Government Open Until Dec. 11 — Safely Past the Midterms

Senate leaders released the text of a short-term spending bill on Sunday that would keep most of the federal government funded at current levels through Dec. 11, an attempt to take the threat of a shutdown off the table for the entire fall campaign season.

The measure was unveiled by Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, and Vice Chair Patty Murray, the Washington Democrat, after days of negotiation over what would ride along with the stopgap. The Senate is expected to vote on it before lawmakers leave Washington at the end of this week for the traditional August recess. Without action, funding for the government lapses on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year — roughly five weeks before voters go to the polls.

Congress has not come close to finishing the dozen annual appropriations bills that are supposed to fund the government line by line. Republicans want a sharp increase in defense spending paired with cuts to domestic programs; President Donald Trump's budget request proposed slicing non-defense spending by 10 percent across the board. By pushing the deadline to December, negotiators buy themselves roughly three more months to bridge that gap — and they do it without forcing vulnerable incumbents to cast shutdown votes in October.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune framed the bill as a matter of basic competence, pointing to the two shutdowns that have already hit in the past 10 months. "We need to ensure that they do not face a third," Thune said of the American public. The most recent lapse, which shuttered the Department of Homeland Security for weeks and left Transportation Security Administration officers working without pay, remains one of the longest funding interruptions in modern congressional history.

Democrats extracted several concessions in exchange for their votes. The Senate text drops $1 billion the House had set aside for a new class of "Trump-class" battleships. It bars the administration from transferring money out of other accounts and into Border Patrol operations, a practice Democrats have argued lets the executive branch rewrite spending decisions Congress already made. And it delays, for the length of the stopgap, a Trump administration rule governing how federal grants are awarded — a rule Collins said could politicize funding decisions and hurt small, rural communities, and which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called "disgraceful."

Murray said the fight over that rule is not finished. "While Republicans rejected killing the proposed rule outright, I'm going to keep fighting," she said.

The House has already passed its own version of a stopgap, but it left out the Democratic priorities the Senate added. That sets up a final round of negotiation between the chambers, with both sides under pressure to close the deal before the recess begins and members scatter to their districts for three months of campaigning.