There is little doubt that the process of funding the government will require another temporary salve when the current stopgap spending bill expires on Nov. 21. Lawmakers widely agree that they must avoid another gap in spending after enduring 35 days of a partial shutdown earlier this year. What remains unknown is what, if any, bills can become law before the Nov. 21 deadline.
“Fundamentally, it’s a political problem,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “You have Congress’s perpetual difficulty in completing the appropriations process on time and this year, it has run headlong into this confrontation involving impeachment.”
While lawmakers’ reliance on short-term spending bills has become more routine in recent years to help them avoid lapses in federal funding, some have objected to such bills that extend funding for months at a time, as opposed to a couple of weeks. While such legislation avoids the most destructive outcome — a lapse in funding, with thousands of federal workers going without pay — it in effect negates increases in spending that lawmakers negotiated earlier this year and makes it difficult for federal agencies to invest in long-term planning.
“There’s not a company that could operate where you say, O.K., we’re gonna operate for awhile, then just think about it and take a rest, then work some more,” Representative Kay Granger of Texas, the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters earlier this month during a discussion about defense funding. “Congress gets in the habit of doing something like that, and it’s incredibly harmful.”
Ms. Granger, like other lawmakers on the appropriations committees, acknowledged that a short-term bill would be preferable to a shutdown, and lawmakers have said they remain focused on converting as many of the dozen must-pass bills into law as possible before Thanksgiving, in an effort to pre-empt any impeachment trial.
But a stopgap spending bill that expires after an impeachment trial would also test the negotiating power of a divided government after what is likely to be a bitter partisan feud over the allegations that Mr. Trump abused his power to pressure Ukraine to open investigations that could benefit him politically.
“To the extent that the appropriations committee has remained and continues to remain a bastion of bipartisanship,” Ms. Reynolds of the Brookings Institution said, “the question of whether the appropriators themselves could come to an agreement is less of an issue than it is for the broader chamber, or even the White House.”