Congress races to avoid another shutdown fight before midterms

House appropriators said July 17 that all 12 fiscal 2027 spending bills had advanced through full committee and three had cleared the House floor, and the chamber followed that with a short-term funding patch on July 21 to buy time before the next shutdown deadline. The two chambers are moving on different tracks, and the Senate is expected to require changes before any measure can become law.

That split is the latest effort to avoid another shutdown fight before the midterm elections. Congress spent much of last year lurching from one funding crisis to the next, and lawmakers now face the same basic problem: if they do not enact funding by the deadline, parts of the federal government can shut down, employees can be furloughed, and everyday services can be delayed or interrupted.

The stakes were made clear in the last major standoff. A House-passed funding bill for seven weeks failed in the Senate on Sept. 23, 2025, and the impasse helped trigger a 43-day government shutdown. President Donald Trump signed the Continuing Appropriations, Agriculture, Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Extensions Act, 2026, on Nov. 12, 2025, ending that shutdown after weeks of disruption.

The pressure did not ease in 2026. A separate funding dispute over the Department of Homeland Security led to a partial shutdown that began Feb. 14. The House passed a DHS funding bill on April 30, and that move ended the lapse. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget updated its fiscal deadlines page on June 11, citing the shutdown and the resolution as another marker of how often Congress has relied on temporary fixes.

Now the House is trying to present a more orderly path into the fall, with appropriators emphasizing that all 12 bills have moved through committee. But the Senate still has its own priorities and procedures, and any bill that crosses over may need to be rewritten before it can advance. That leaves several unresolved fights, from the length of any stopgap measure to which policy riders can survive the trip between chambers.

With another funding deadline approaching and midterms drawing closer, the question on Capitol Hill is not whether another shutdown fight is possible. It is whether Congress can avoid handing voters one more lapse that would test federal operations, strain workers, and further erode trust in basic governance.