With passage of the reconciliation bill complete, Congress is turning in earnest to the Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations process. Five of the twelve appropriations bills (Agriculture, Defense, Homeland Security, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction-Veterans Affairs) have advanced out of the House Appropriations Committee, and one, the Mil-Con funding bill, has passed the full House. The House is also preparing to consider the Defense appropriations bill (H.R. 4016) as soon as next week.

In the upper chamber, on July 10 the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced two spending bills – Agriculture and Legislative Branch.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote in a letter this week that Democratic votes will be difficult to come by if Republicans continue the effort to push President Trump’s recissions package, a claw back of $9.4 billion ($8.3 billion in foreign aid and $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) previously appropriated by Congress.

“Republicans’ passage of this purely partisan proposal would be an affront to the bipartisan appropriations process,” Schumer wrote. “That’s why a number of Senate Republicans know it is absurd for them to expect Democrats to act as business as usual and engage in a bipartisan appropriations process to fund the government, while they concurrently plot to pass a purely partisan rescissions bill to defund those same programs negotiated on a bipartisan basis behind the scenes.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) intends to bring the recissions package to the Senate floor next week. Unlike the Big Beautiful Bill, which could not be filibustered and advanced by a vote of 51-50, appropriations bills and the recissions package will likely need to meet a 60-vote threshold to advance.

Fiscal Year 2026 begins on October 1, 2025.