The House is making a push to formally conference government funding legislation for fiscal 2026 with the Senate, breaking with recent norms as Congress stares down a Sept. 30 deadline to prevent a government shutdown.
The House voted this week to begin to conference three of the 12 annual funding bills for fiscal 2026: for the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, rural development and military construction and the legislative branch.
“What we’re really advocating for is an actual, old-school conference, the way this is supposed to work, between the House and Senate,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a press conference on Tuesday.
But there’s uncertainty in the upper chamber around whether the Senate will take a similar route.
Asked Thursday whether the Senate would follow the House’s lead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told The Hill he’s “all for conferencing” but added Democrats would need to “sign off on that.”
“I’d like to see us get back to regular order and doing things the old-fashioned way, where both sides try and actually find a solution, but they’re in negotiations going on,” he said.
In recent days, Democratic appropriators have signaled openness to the process, but they’ve acknowledged there are key differences to reconcile between both chambers.
House Democrats are already pushing for more funding in areas like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children than proposed in the House GOP-crafted bill, while also decrying partisan riders they’ve panned as “poison pills.”
“At a time when families around the country are struggling to afford health care, housing, and other essentials for their families, House Republicans failed to provide the resources needed to help Americans keep food on their tables,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Thursday.
“There will be no agreement without addressing these urgent issues.”
Johnson appointed the 32 conferees as part of the process on Thursday, with 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats.
They include DeLauro and House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), as well as a list of senior appropriators, such as Reps. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), John Carter (R-Texas), Andy Harris (R-Md.), David Valadao (R-Calif.), Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.)
Cole told reporters that the process would allow for more involvement from members in funding negotiations.
“A formal one, everybody’s involved,” he said. “You get a much better reflection.”
“If you do an informal one, basically, it’s the subcommittee chairmen negotiating, the Big Four, sorting it out,” he said, referring to the four top funding negotiators in the House and Senate on both sides. “I would prefer much more member involvement, and I know the Speaker would.”
The Appropriations Committee said the effort “marks the first time” since fiscal 2019 “that regular appropriations bills could proceed to a conference committee, demonstrating renewed action to restore regular order.”
Cole on Wednesday called the vote to begin a conference “a notable milestone that will request to convene the first conference on major appropriations legislation in almost a decade.”
But Congress is facing a tight time crunch before the Sept. 30 deadline, while also negotiating a stopgap funding bill. Cole also acknowledged the timing constraints the Senate could face as part of the process.
Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a senior appropriator, noted the process could open the door to “lengthier votes and lengthier discussions.”
Funding deals between both chambers in recent years have typically been negotiated between senior members of the appropriate committees and leadership, though many lawmakers have agitated for a process that brings in more rank-and-file members.
“We’ve never been this close to anything, arguably regular order,” Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), a spending cardinal, told The Hill on Wednesday.
“And so we’re excited about doing it, because it gets us started,” Amodei said.
However, he and other appropriators have been raising doubts that they’ll be able to pass the three bills before the start of the new fiscal year.
Appropriators on both sides had been hopeful of passing the so-called minibus alongside a funding stopgap, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), to keep the government open at current funding levels come Oct. 1.
Amodei said the conference “starts the formal process to get some stuff out of the way so that if you end up getting to the end of a CR, if it’s November or whatever, first of all, you’ve started clearing out some of those things so the CR gets smaller.”
But he added that he doesn’t “think we’re going to get a minibus together” as part of the funding sprint to Sept. 30.
“Hope I’m wrong,” he said.
