Speaker Approaches Legislative Triumph With Funding Package

On Thursday, Congress could take a step toward restoring a now old-fashioned way of funding the government while eliminating a spending policy from President Joe Biden’s administration.

The House will consider its final batch of appropriations bills for fiscal year 2026 to fund several federal agencies. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., on Wednesday said the spending process has been restored to a “committee-led, member-driven approach.”

“It will spend less than another continuing resolution and it will continue to advance our America First agenda,” Johnson said of the package. “Once we pass the final batch this week, Republicans will have finally replaced the last of any Biden-era spending levels with Trump-era spending levels.”

Johnson has promised to restore the practice of passing individual spending bills each year. This approach, known as “regular order,” is an alternative to the chamber’s more recent habit of funding the government through continuing resolutions, which simply extend previous funding, or omnibus bills, which jam together many different spending bills for one vote.

‘Regular Order’ or Not?

Upon passage, the House will then send the four bills to the Senate, combined with two bills passed last week to fund the State Department and financial regulators. The Senate will have time to pass the package before the Jan. 30 deadline to fund the government.

Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, who has long advocated for considering individual appropriations bills, told The Daily Signal that he does view the current process as a marginal improvement from the previous funding approach.

“We’re at least getting a vote on every appropriations bill in the House. Not as stand-alone bills, which would be nicer, and not subject to amendment—which is essentially the definition of regular order,” he told The Daily Signal. 

“So it clearly isn’t regular order yet,” he said, adding that “minibuses are at least progress to break it into smaller chunks.”

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told The Daily Signal that he views splitting up votes on bills as a step towards regular order but still desires individual bills in the future.

“I wish you’d say every spending bill is less than a paragraph. That’s the way we do it in Tennessee, and we’ve got a balanced budget, because nobody can hide behind a thousand-page bill in the Tennessee legislature,” Burchett said.

In the House Rules Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said the current process is “barely a toe in the water to regular order,” but nevertheless “a trajectory towards regular order, and that is a good thing.”

Roy called the House’s work to modestly cut discretionary spending “an important signal to the markets” and an “understanding of where we are in terms of our overall debt load in this country that we’re trying to constrain.”

Homeland Security

Democrats will likely show their fiercest opposition to the bill funding the Department of Homeland Security–particularly funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement–after the death of Renee Good in an ICE-involved shooting. 

The homeland security section will be considered independently from the other three bills on the House floor.

California Rep. Pete Aguilar, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, told reporters that his fellow caucus members expressed a largely negative view of the bill.

“In the last 24 hours, we’ve heard our members speak loudly that ICE isn’t doing enough. These reforms aren’t enough. Their lawlessness has to stop,” said Aguilar. “There aren’t enough guardrails within this bill. … It’s unfortunate that the behavior of ICE is jeopardizing the homeland security bill.”

In response to Aguilar’s comments, a DHS spokesperson gave The Daily Signal a list of illegal immigrants arrested for violent crimes, and said, “These are who the Democrats are protecting by trying to defund ICE law enforcement.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, has already said he will vote for the bill.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who sits on the rules committee told The Daily Signal he sees giving Democrats an opportunity to vote separately on Homeland security as a positive.

“I think it’s good. Let them vote on that, get them on record. I mean, I don’t see anything wrong with that,” Norman said Thursday.

“I think we will get it passed,” Speaker Johnson told reporters Wednesday. House Republicans currently hold a thin majority in the chamber.

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