Lawmakers face setbacks and negotiations on budget bills

All summer, Republicans in the House of Representatives have worked to give themselves a winning hand for the rapidly approaching scuffle over funding for the next fiscal year. Some members hope that, if Republicans can pass all 12 appropriations bills well ahead of the Oct. 1 deadline, they can force Democrats into granular negotiations around pre-existing texts—a kind of home field advantage. But that plan suffered a setback on Thursday when a handful of their own members voted with Democrats to tank the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act of 2025.

The bill failed in a 205-213 vote. Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., one of the 10 Republicans who voted against the package, said the bill had too many add-ons for him to ignore.

“Electric vehicles on Capitol Hill property, funds going towards electric vehicles, electric vehicle chargers—taxpayers don’t want to be on the hook for things like that,” Burchett said. “It’s just ridiculous. It just never stops.”

The bill would have totaled $5.3 billion in cost.

Although Republicans still have ample opportunity to continue passing spending bills before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, Thursday’s failed vote illustrates the challenge facing Republican appropriators. They must produce bills that fiscal conservatives like Burchett can support—while also making them palatable to Democrats in the Senate. Top Republican appropriators believe the only way to do that is to let legislators negotiate out the details across party lines and delegate that responsibility away from party leadership.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, announced that all the appropriations bills had made it out of committee at a press conference on Thursday morning.

“Let me just [say] how proud I am of each of these gentlemen and the committees they ran,” Cole said Thursday morning. “These guys got us through the process and positioned us now as a conference to put those bills onto the floor. We’ve done our part.”

If Congress can succeed in passing all 12 bills on time, it would mark the first instance since 1997 that Congress adheres to its own spending procedure as laid out by the 1974 Congressional Budget Act.

For many of the past 40 years, congressional leadership lumped all expenses into mammoth omnibus bills—a process fiscal conservatives say cuts out lawmaker participation and reduces transparency. Returning to the 12 bills has been a major aim for U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who pledged to make decentralization of power a key part of his speakership.

Jared Pincin, associate professor of economics at Cedarville University, says the bills themselves won’t solve the government’s budget deficits, but will go a long way towards returning Congress to the way it’s supposed to approach spending.

“At the end of June, they had passed zero last year. They’ve passed four. So, they’re ahead of schedule,” Pincin said. “If they can pass all 12 appropriations [bills] and put them in the Senate’s seat, that’s in some ways a win—that shows that Speaker Johnson is serious about at least adhering to some fiscal responsibility with the timeline.”

That’s step one. Step two is taking the negotiations to Democrats in the Senate.

Partly due to Johnson’s promises and partly because of pragmatic considerations, Cole of Oklahoma said he expects that process to rely heavily on the work of the 12 Republican House cardinals. The cardinals are legislators tasked with crafting the bills and shepherding the bills through Congress.

“I would expect each one of these cardinals to handle the negotiations for their respective bills,” Cole said, gesturing to a colleague standing nearby. “Nobody knows defense better than Ken Calvert. Nobody knows commerce and science better than Hal Rogers,” referring to two fellow Republican representatives, Calvert of California and Rogers from Kentucky. “So, you know it’s a mistake to let people that haven’t worked to prepare the bills negotiate the final product.”

Cardinals haven’t always played a leading role. In fact, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., says their participation tends to fluctuate from year to year. Fleischmann oversees the bill on energy and water.

“We as cardinals—and I respect Chairman Cole for doing this—gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility to negotiate our respective bills with our Senate counterparts,” Fleischmann said. “It’s a complex process but every year it’s a unique process. The House will be well-prepared this year.”

I asked Fleishmann, what does having prepassed bills do for Republicans? Won’t Democrats force changes Republicans don’t want to see regardless of what the starting point?

“I’m a lawyer by profession,” Fleishmann said. “I practiced law for 24 years. My best efforts and results were when I was prepared. When I knew my subject matter. I wrote that bill. I will be prepared to negotiate that bill.”

He noted that, when kept to legislators steeped in the policy specifics, the process can become a lot less partisan. Fleischmann says he thinks he and the other cardinals can use that to create passable bills.

Although Democratic leadership have repeatedly said many of the Republican-led bills are nonstarters, Cole expressed optimism of the path forward.

“I’m a classic Republican,” Cole said. “The further you push down the decision the better off you are. Put the people that have actually written the bills, wrestled with the issues in a room together and you’ll be surprised how much better the product will be.”

For now, the House has eight outstanding appropriations bills to pass. Cole declined to comment on whether Republicans would skip the August recess if the House failed to complete the bills’ passage by the end of July. The Senate has yet to consider any of the bills passed by the House.