Senate Republican leaders plan to abandon a House-passed funding patch to reopen government and pivot to a new bill that would provide more time to complete fiscal 2026 appropriations.
The move reflects a growing recognition that the funding extension to Nov. 21, as the House proposed in September, would no longer provide enough time to complete appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. It also comes after Democrats blocked the House measure from advancing in the Senate more than a dozen times.
“The idea that we could get any appropriations bills done … by November the 21st now … that date’s lost,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Monday in confirming the new strategy. “The objective here is to try and get something that we could send back to the House that would open up the government.”
Until Monday, GOP leaders had been hoping they could simply rubber-stamp the House-passed bill and deliver it to President Donald Trump’s desk — the swiftest path for ending the month-old partial government shutdown.
The pivot toward a new bill means Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., would have to call the House back into session to hold another vote. The House has been in recess since Sept. 19, when it passed its short-term stopgap bill. And Johnson had vowed not to call the House back into session until the government reopened, in an attempt to pressure Senate Democrats to vote for the House-passed bill.
But more than six weeks later, Democrats have refused to cave and the partial shutdown is set to become the longest in history as of Wednesday. As a condition for reopening the government, Democrats have insisted on extending health insurance subsidies that are set to expire at year’s end and send premiums soaring.
Thune said he was optimistic that a deal could emerge to end the shutdown this week, though he was careful to hedge his bets. “If we don’t start seeing some progress, or some evidence of that by at least the middle of this week, it’s hard to see how we would finish anything by the end of the week,” he said.
But before senators can draft a new stopgap measure, they must decide how long a new funding extension should last.
Funding patch duration in dispute
Opposition has been building against setting a December deadline, which would require finishing full-year bills just before the holiday recess, as some Senate appropriators would like.
Hard-line conservatives renewed their push Monday for a short-term funding patch that would extend at least into mid-January, warning lawmakers against passing an end-of-year omnibus spending package right before the holidays.
In a pair of posts on X, GOP Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah indicated support for a continuing resolution that would extend funding at current levels beyond Jan. 15.
“Democrats shut down the government because they hate President Trump and want to waste more of YOUR dollars after putting the nation on the path for an unsustainable $38 trillion in debt,” Scott wrote. “Any new continuing resolution must extend past January 15 to avoid a Christmas omnibus.”
Lee endorsed Scott’s message in a follow-up post shortly afterward.
“I’m certainly open to it,” Thune said of a January deadline. “As you look at the calendar, if you want to do normal appropriations work, you look at how long it takes to get bills across the floor in the Senate and through the House. The longer sort of runway there is better.”
But multiple GOP appropriators in the Senate have expressed support for a stopgap that ends before January to keep pressure on lawmakers to hash out their annual funding bills. Thune acknowledged the disagreement, saying he was “certainly listening to our colleagues and trying to figure out kind of where that landing spot would be.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., meanwhile, appeared to welcome the change of strategy at his news conference Monday. He said a longer-term continuing resolution would be “a small step in the right direction, as it relates to actually having bipartisan conversations to enact an enlightened spending bill that actually makes life better for the American people and doesn’t continue to gut the health care of everyday Americans.”
Appropriations game plan
Appropriators have begun mapping out a potential game plan on what bills to move once the government reopens. GOP leadership has already pushed for both chambers to formally conference the three bills funding the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs and the legislative branch that the Senate passed as a package over the summer.
Bipartisan funding talks also picked up in the Senate last week, as members face growing pressure to end the shutdown amid rising uncertainty over food stamps payments.
Senate negotiators say they’re eyeing a second potential funding package that combines the Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, and potentially other bills, possibly including the Transportation-HUD and Commerce-Justice-Science measures.
“I think appropriators want it to be before the end of the year,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, a senior appropriator, said last week when asked for his preference for a CR length. “I think December is the most logical timeline,” he said.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, has also said that she is “not eager to go into January.”
But GOP leadership in both chambers have yet to land on a new potential end date. A White House official said the administration would defer to congressional Republicans for determining the length of the next continuing resolution.
Johnson, meanwhile, would prefer a funding extension into January as opposed to December, according to sources familiar with his thinking.
“This is a very important matter,” Johnson said Monday at a news conference. “It’s something that we’re giving all of our attention to. Our leaders will go and meet on the calendar right now. We’re watching every day.”
Jacob Fulton and Aidan Quigley contributed to this report.
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