The President signed a bill on Wednesday, September 2. Congress was already turning its attention away from Washington and toward the campaign trail.
The bill does not fund the government for the year ahead. It only makes sure that nobody in Washington has to fight about money until after the election.
Congress calls that a stopgap. Halftime is the better word for it.
The bill is H.R. 6500, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act of 2027. It freezes the federal government at last year’s spending levels through December 11, 2026, and it does not settle a single argument. The real fight over what the country spends this year got pushed into a five-week window after Election Day, and it goes back to the same Congress that could not finish the job in nine months. Both parties agreed to that because it protects their candidates. It does nothing for anyone else.
The word stopgap sounds harmless. It is not.
The formal name is a continuing resolution. It keeps last year’s dollar amounts in place for a set period instead of setting new ones. Congress is supposed to pass twelve separate full-year spending bills covering areas like defense, homeland security, energy, and housing, and all twelve are supposed to be signed into law before the federal budget year starts on October 1.
Not one of those twelve bills for 2027 had passed both chambers by the deadline. Not one. The stopgap fills the gap between the old year’s money running out and the new year’s bills getting written, and that is all it does.
So Congress cannot pass a budget. That is the story most people have heard, and yet it is only half true.
H.R. 6500 also contains non-budget line items. The bill blocks the Office of Management and Budget from finishing a rule that would let political appointees screen federal grants for political reasons. It bars any new money, including transfers between agencies, from going to immigration enforcement agencies. It stops the Defense Department from starting new production programs that were not already funded in 2026, while making exceptions for the Columbia-class and Virginia-class submarine programs, aircraft carrier refueling, and other high-priority military work.
And there is more. The bill keeps dozens of programs alive that were about to expire, including the National Flood Insurance Program, highway and transportation spending, veterans’ health and housing programs, the Technology Modernization Fund, cybersecurity information-sharing laws, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act. It keeps SNAP food assistance and WIC running at current levels, with a thirty-day grace period so a future lapse would not cut off benefits right away. It delays a change to the federal definition of hemp. It also freezes cost-of-living pay raises for members of Congress.
That is a tremendous amount of work, negotiated across two chambers and two parties in a matter of weeks.
Now compare that with the rest of this year. The same Congress that could not send a single one of its twelve annual spending bills to the President managed to put all of that together in a matter of weeks, united by a shared goal: moving an uncomfortable subject past the election.
The vote count puts a spotlight on this story. The Senate passed the bill 90 to 6 in early August, right before leaving town for its recess. The House passed it 370 to 48 on Tuesday, September 1.
We all witnessed how both parties can work together when they want to. They can move fast, and by huge margins, when they want to avoid a fight in front of the voters and quickly escape Washington for the campaign trails.
Nobody hid the reason, either. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said the bill “will allow Congress time to get past the November elections, and allow us time to assess and move forward with further appropriations measures in November and December.” Politico and CNN reported the same thing. The stopgap lets sitting members campaign through Election Day on November 3 without a shutdown fight producing bad headlines.
When Congress misses a deadline, the usual explanation is that the other party made it impossible. That is not what happened here. The people who wrote the bill said plainly that the deadline was set around the campaign calendar.
Now look at what is waiting after the election.
Between Election Day and December 11 there are about five weeks. In that time Congress has to write and pass twelve full-year spending bills that it could not finish in the previous nine months.
The election results will hang over every hour of it. Control of the House is on the ballot, and who wins changes how much leverage each side thinks it has going into the December deadline.
If there is no full-year deal and no new stopgap by December 11, the money runs out again. A shutdown becomes possible in the weeks before the holidays.
Here is the part that is most concerning. The current Congress handles that deadline, not the incoming one, because the new Congress is not sworn in until January. Final spending levels for 2027 will be set in part by members who lost on November 3 and who will never face those voters again.
Think of the year as a football season, because that is how it has played out.
The 2026 season has run all year. There have been plays and penalties, scorekeeping, injuries, and roster changes, and the country has watched every quarter of it.
The whistle has now blown. The halftime show runs from today until November 3, and it will be loud, expensive, and well rehearsed.
Then comes the second half, and that is the bloody one. That is where the 2027 budget actually gets decided, on a short clock, by a roster that is partly on its way out the door.
The problem is not that the people in Congress are bad people. The problem is that neither party has any incentive to bring forth a bipartisan budget. Our two parties are built to win the next election. Both sides will treat the post-election budget negotiations as a campaign tool first and as a governing job second.
That is the gap the Centercratic Party was built to fill. The party is founded on nine principles that hold whether they help win an election or cost one, and three of those principles tie directly to this.
The first principle is to safeguard our democratic system, which means governing through compromise instead of domination. The Constitution assumes compromise. What the country just watched was two parties compromising on one thing only, which was the timing of their next fight.
The fifth principle is to debate with facts and dignity, which means arguing over facts, treating each other with respect, admitting where the real disagreements are, and refusing personal attacks and bad-faith tactics. That is not what the first eight months of this year looked like. Eight months in, the two parties have almost nothing to show for their work, and not one of the twelve spending bills has cleared both chambers. A shutdown fight was judged too costly to hold before the election because both sides knew exactly how it would be conducted.
The sixth principle is to seek unity through broad support, which means building policies that earn wide and lasting agreement. A bill that passes 90 to 6 and 370 to 48 is not wide agreement on a budget. It is wide agreement on putting the budget off.
You can read the full set of principles at Centercratic.party.
There are times when a stopgap bill makes sense. Shutdowns do real damage. Federal workers miss paychecks, services people count on stop, contractors go unpaid, and families living close to the edge get hurt the worst. A Congress that keeps the lights on while it works through a hard negotiation is behaving better than one that lets the money run out to make a point.
That argument would hold up if the delay were being used to get the work done. It is not. Nothing in H.R. 6500 requires a single one of the twelve bills to move during the fifteen weeks it buys, no committee has to produce anything, and the same fights that stalled everything in the spring will be waiting in November with far less time to settle them.
Moving a deadline does not settle anything.
The timing argument breaks down for another reason. The people who negotiate the December deal are the members serving right now, including the ones voters just decided to send home. Voters will have spoken, and the same people will still be making the call.
Avoiding a shutdown is worth doing. Avoiding a shutdown to duck a fight you were elected to have is something else, and voters have a right to know which one they got.
The halftime show is underway. For the next two months both teams will tell the country that the other one is the reason nothing gets done, and then on December 12, Americans could wake up to a closed government, shut down by the same people who proved in September that they can keep it open any time it suits them.