As Congress approaches a funding deadline and the prospect of a government shutdown gets realer by the minute, lawmakers are confronting a difficult question: How do you write a spending bill when spending is getting slashed every day?
Hardly anyone has an answer.
Some just want President Donald Trump to handle it. Some think Congress should codify the cuts as soon as possible. Others want it done through reconciliation. And still some others want to keep on spending like normal and just roll back the dollars when they can.
“We’ve got to be able to walk and talk and chew gum at the same time,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn said.
But the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts are presenting congressional appropriators with a logistical nightmare — not just ahead of next week’s government funding deadline, but for long-term funding prospects.
As the cuts continue, top-line numbers for government spending are constantly in flux, and the already belabored appropriations process has become even more confounding.
DOGE has already slashed the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau from existence. Thousands of jobs throughout federal agencies have been eliminated. And Elon Musk’s effort to root out waste in government spending has led to heaps of contracts being cut short.
“It is incredibly chaotic,” the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray, said on the floor this week. “And it makes it much harder to write legislation that actually responds to the latest developments, when programs are switching on and off again like a two-year-old is playing with a light switch.”
Republican leaders have balked at Democratic attempts to leverage the looming shutdown to extract assurances that congressionally approved funding actually be used for the congressionally approved purposes. Short of an agreement, Democrats are skeptical of Republicans’ intentions and wary of signing off on any spending legislation.
“It’s very hard to write an appropriations bill when these guys are seizing control of spending illegally,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said. “I mean, there’s nothing normal about this moment.”
While Republicans insist the Trump administration has broad authority to gut federal programs without congressional consent, lawmakers would like to eventually codify those cuts in law.
But Republican proposals are all over the board.
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS: “The best way to do it is to allow them to keep doing it the way that they are now, just through the general exercise of executive authority that they’re wielding.”
Influential conservative Rep. Andy Biggs said “it’d be best” if lawmakers stuck the cuts in the upcoming reconciliation bill, raising yet another idea.
And as Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said, lawmakers have to “give Congress time to digest it, look at it, make sure these numbers are real.”
“There’s a lot of this stuff I agree with,” Cole added. “Other members got to worry about their districts or this or that, or here’s something maybe you don’t see on a spreadsheet. You got to have a deliberative process to arrive in the right place.”
During a meeting with Senate Republicans this week, Musk reportedly pumped his fist when he learned about the procedural maneuver to claw back congressionally approved funds.
Many GOP members have maintained that Congress needs to play a role in making spending cuts official. Rescissions — which can be approved by a simple-majority vote in both chambers — allow government spending that’s already been approved to be withdrawn.
But the rarely used tactic is wonky, and it doesn’t have sweeping support with Republicans. In 2018, an attempt to rescind $15 billion in federal programs failed due to GOP opposition. Sen. Susan Collins and former Sen. Richard Burr voted no.
“We’re going to have to see how that package is put together,” Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso said this week of the rescissions proposal. “We tried that in the first Trump administration and fell a couple of votes short.”
When pressed on the proposal to use rescissions to codify DOGE cuts, Cole drilled down on the timeline, emphasizing that Congress would need significant time to consider such a package.
“We have to have time to look at that stuff,” Cole said. “You can’t just stick it in a bill and put it in front of members.”
What’s more, rescissions could create something of a doom loop. If Congress at a later date passes further government funding, but more DOGE-style cuts are made, lawmakers could end up needing additional rescissions to codify cuts into law as well.
“That’s one option,” GOP Sen. Mike Rounds said of how cuts could be addressed in future rounds of funding. “I don’t think anybody would mind that rather than simply wasting it.”
But even DOGE’s conservative cheerleaders are nervous about taking an overzealous legislative approach. Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ralph Norman said that Musk acknowledged that his move-fast-and-break-things strategy has, indeed, broken some programs worth keeping around. By codifying cuts in law, Congress would make Musk’s mistakes permanent.
“He needs to refine them, make sure that the numbers are right. He’s acknowledged that there’s some mistakes,” Norman told NOTUS. “And then just put them on the floor.”
Another conservative, Rep. Chip Roy, insisted that the executive branch has significant authority without the legislative branch. If and when Congress intervenes, Roy said the White House would have a major hand crafting rescissions legislation.
In the meantime, Roy said extending current funding levels buys the White House time to continue identifying program cuts to build a comprehensive package down the line.
“I would rather freeze spending, let the executive branch identify more cuts, exercise some of those cuts via impoundment, get that kind of fight underway,” Roy said, adding that lawmakers could address all these issues in spending bills for the next fiscal year.
The timeline remains nebulous at best, but GOP lawmakers on the fence about backing a continuing resolution next week say the prospect of a rescissions package at some point makes them feel better about another continuing resolution extending a spending deal crafted under Joe Biden.
“That rescissions package would get people like me that are worried about the so-called clean CR,” the DOGE caucus’ chair, Rep. Aaron Bean, told NOTUS. “Then we can rest assured that we’re not continuing on with the Biden legacy.”
Leadership is due to release the specifics of a CR this weekend, setting up a vote early next week. To win as much of the GOP conference as possible — including moderates squeamish about DOGE cuts affecting their districts — the CR will likely be a lean extension of current funding.
House Republicans and the White House are pressing for an extension through September, to free up bandwidth to focus on the 2026 spending process and the proposed cuts that come with it. While some appropriators want a shorter extension, hoping lawmakers could finally come to a deal on 2025 spending negotiations, the consensus on Capitol Hill is they won’t get it.
“My best guess right now is that the House will pass, or attempt to pass, a full-year CR,” Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters. “I just hope we get it early enough to take a look at it.”
Still, in the Senate, government funding is subject to a 60-vote threshold for passage, meaning a handful of Democrats would need to join Republicans in voting for approval. It’s unclear whether there’s support for a CR extending for the rest of the fiscal year.
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin told reporters he doesn’t sense there is, and that he himself wouldn’t want a CR going until October.
“If the CR ends up repeated a spending pattern that may not even be existent, it’s wasteful,” Durbin said.
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Ursula Perano and Riley Rogerson are reporters at NOTUS.