Congress works best on a deadline. The need to have the threat of impending doom looming before anything can get done is honestly one of the most relatable things about America’s lawmakers. But the dwindling calendar is doing little to spur the legislative branch into action on some major issues.
If this Monday is included, there are four legislative days until the Obamacare subsidies lapse and 16 legislative days before the federal government plunges into another shutdown.
Two dates ought to be circled in red on the calendars of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. Dec. 31 is when a set of expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire. Without new legislation, health-care costs will skyrocket for millions of their members’ constituents.
Jan. 30 is the expiration date of the short-term funding bill lawmakers passed to reopen the government in November. Absent another continuing resolution or an appropriations bill for the rest of the fiscal year, we’ll find ourselves right back in another shutdown.
The dwindling calendar is doing little to spur the legislative branch into action on some major issues.
Given that the last shutdown was the longest in federal history — and tied to the expiring Obamacare subsidies — you might expect that lawmakers would feel some urgency to deal with these problems. Maybe even make some sort of extended effort to hammer out a workable solution before the year ends.
You’d be wrong.
Congress won’t be around when the Obamacare subsidies’ funding runs dry. This is the last week on the House and Senate’s legislative calendars before everyone clears out of Washington. And it’s not even a five-day workweek for most of them, as the House calendar shows. Lawmakers tend to pack up on Thursday nights so they can fly back to their home states on Friday.
And with the new year starting on a Thursday, don’t expect legislators to rush back to the Capitol. The Senate is scheduled to resume work on Monday, Jan. 5. The House – enjoying a leisurely start to 2026, apparently – is set to reconvene on Jan. 6. To the House’s (very little credit), members are expected to stick around that Friday. But thanks to the way lawmakers have devised their calendar, there’s precious little time in January to address the crucial funding bills.
According to the Senate’s 2026 legislative schedule, Jan. 19 marks the beginning of another “State Work Period,” which is what the upper chamber calls its vacation time. (There may be some work done in their local offices, but a recess is a recess by any other name.) That covers the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday and the rest of the following week (which, incidentally, is way more time off than most working Americans get).
Meanwhile, the House’s 2026 calendar has lawmakers taking off only MLK Day during that period. They’ll still get their rest in though — their “District Work Period” will last the full next week, which is the last week of the month, which is when the government is poised to run out of money again.
Don’t forget that during the previous shutdown, Johnson sent his members home to their districts rather than, say, stay in Washington and work on the funding bills that would serve as a long-term solution. (Time management isn’t exactly a strong suit on the Hill.)
Time management isn’t exactly a strong suit on the Hill.
The House plans to spend this week cobbling together legislation ostensibly to help ease the pain from the expiring subsidies. There’s little consensus, though, and a lot of frustration across the GOP caucus about what that relief should look like. Johnson and his leadership team introduced a package of proposals Friday, none of which extend the expiring subsides, and condensing what should have been months of work into a compressed time frame hasn’t given them a lot of time to sell the plan to the rank-and-file.
The Senate has already voted down two potential health-care fixes, one from each party. Rather than trying to reach a compromise, senators are expected to spend the next few days trying to get the House-passed version of the National Defense Authorization Act over the line. Any potential action on health care will almost certainly wait until January.
And there’s still the rest of the government to fund, minus three full-year appropriations passed alongside the compromise that ended the shutdown. Thune said in November that he’d like to quickly pass a so-called “mini-bus” package of five full-year funding bills once the government reopened. In December, he said it appeared less likely that those bills would pass before the Christmas break. Weeks later the bills are no closer to passage, largely thanks to a rebellion among conservative senators.
According to The Hill, Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida “object to the dozens of earmarks in the package” and “the sheer size of the package and its array of special authorizing provisions they say are tucked in and haven’t been fully vetted by the proper committees of jurisdiction.” Punchbowl reported that GOP Senate appropriators are getting frustrated with Thune for not ratcheting up pressure on the holdouts.
Thune promised a return to “regular order,” or the practice in which the 12 appropriations bills are debated and passed separately. In recent years the tendency has been to cram them all into one pass-or-fail omnibus. Thune became majority leader by promising to work the will of his conference rather than adopting the arm-twisting style of his predecessor, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The January deadline is likely to test Thune’s willingness to hold to that approach. (Johnson isn’t faring much better at moving those funding bills through the House, but he also hasn’t shared Thune’s focus on the appropriations process.)
There’s always a chance that Johnson and Thune will cancel scheduled breaks and keep their members working. But don’t count on a Christmas miracle. The holidays have been the traditional cutoff point for short-term funding bills, ostensibly encouraging a last-minute breakthrough of goodwill. But Johnson has come out against December deadlines and the resulting omnibus bills that have accompanied them. With their compromise to reopen the government lawmakers bought themselves extra time on contentious issues, but it seems that Republicans aren’t poised to spend it wisely or well.
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