Republicans and Democrats have different spending priorities but are largely united in the hope of striking a bipartisan deal the next time the government needs funding.
As Congress passed another stopgap spending bill to keep the government running on autopilot through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year, lawmakers The Washington Times interviewed said they do not see it setting a precedent for the appropriations battles still to come in the Trump administration.
“Republicans are focused on getting this done under regular order and getting appropriations bills worked on in a bipartisan way, to get them passed and signed into law,” said Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, told The Times the stopgap allows lawmakers to put “FY25 behind us.”
“We can pivot now,” he said. “We’ll get Trump’s budget, and we’ll write the bills. That’s a good thing.”
Some Democrats say the GOP desire to avoid more continuing resolutions, as stopgap spending bills are called, is genuine.
“I don’t think anybody’s really overjoyed with this outcome, so I think that maybe we’ll have a resolve to do a truly bipartisan budget the next time, and do it more quickly, so that the House isn’t given the opportunity to seize the initiative and present us with a fait accompli,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat.
But alongside the bipartisan optimism, lawmakers were quick to blame the opposite party for the fiscal 2025 appropriations process going off the rails.
The House passed six fiscal 2025 appropriations bills last Congress, while the Senate passed zero. Regular order would have lawmakers pass 12 annual spending bills, but most don’t make it through both chambers until after the fiscal year has begun and often in a catchall omnibus package.
For fiscal 2025, even the fallback omnibus deal proved elusive and Congress decided for the first time since fiscal 2013 to rely solely on stopgap measures.
Republicans say it’s Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer’s fault for not bringing appropriations bills to the floor when he was majority leader last year after 11 of the 12 annual bills were reported out of committee on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.
“It’s a complete dereliction of duty by the former Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, which is why he’s the minority leader today,” Mr. Barrasso said.
Mr. Thune campaigned for his promotion to the top leadership role on a promise to do things differently and devote significant floor time to appropriations bills.
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who ran against Mr. Thune for GOP leader, called it “the right thing to do.”
“Hopefully we can get everybody on board to actually start passing budgets,” Mr. Scott said. “In my case, balanced budgets. That’s what I want.”
Democrats blame House Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership for the fiscal 2025 failure and are wary about trusting him moving forward.
“A lot of folks have forgotten that it was House Republicans that walked away from an agreement and a deal that was supposed to be there in December,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, New Mexico Democrat.
He was referring to Mr. Johnson’s decision to avoid a postelection bipartisan negotiation with Mr. Schumer and President Biden on their way out of power. Instead, the Louisiana Republican successfully pushed for a stopgap measure through March 14 to punt negotiations into the Trump administration.
But despite holding the trifecta of both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republicans still needed to work with Democrats to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.
Democrats overplayed their hand in negotiations, demanding language restricting President Trump’s authority to block or shift appropriations passed by Congress that Republicans said was a nonstarter.
The impasse on that issue led Republicans to pursue a stopgap measure for the remainder of the fiscal year and Democrats to wrestle internally with whether to shut down the government to push back against Mr. Trump and his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Schumer relented on the shutdown fight, drawing outside calls for his resignation as minority leader, internal frustration and questions about how Democrats avoid a repeat scenario in fiscal 2026.
“There’s a question as to how we avoid this same situation in September, so that’ll be an important conversation for us to have as a party,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, Arizona Democrat, suggested Democrats conduct a “good postmortem” similar to what he and his fellow Marines did at the end of combat missions.
“We would stop at the end and say, what happened?” Mr. Gallego said. “What proceeded to cause this reaction? Did we react correctly? Could we do better? And in the future, what do we learn?”
Mr. Schumer acknowledged that House Republicans in September could try to jam the Senate with another partisan spending bill. But he’s hopeful for more bipartisanship if Democrats are successful in shifting public sentiment away from Mr. Trump and his policies.
“I don’t believe he’ll be as popular in September as he is today, and I believe we might have a decent chance,” Mr. Schumer said. “A lot of these Republican appropriators don’t like what happened. But they’re so afraid of Trump, they went along.”
Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, is broadcasting plans to use the fiscal 2026 process to codify the DOGE savings and is not expecting much, if any, Democratic cooperation.
“We’re going to appropriate and create a smaller, leaner, more efficient, effective federal government,” the speaker said on “The Moon Griffon Show.” “This is the Super Bowl. This is what we’ve been waiting on our whole lives. And because we have a Trump White House, Republicans in the Senate and the House, we finally have a chance to do it.”
• Alex Miller contributed to this story.
