Senate leaders prepare to pivot to a new bill to end shutdown

Source: Roll Call

Posted November 3, 2025 at 3:21pm, Updated at 5:11pm


Senate Republican leaders plan to abandon a House-passed funding patch to reopen government and pivot to a new bill that would provide more time to complete fiscal 2026 appropriations. The move reflects a growing recognition that the funding extension to Nov. 21, as the House proposed in September, would no longer provide enough time to complete appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. It also comes after Democrats blocked the House measure from advancing in the Senate more than a dozen times.

“The idea that we could get any appropriations bills done … by November the 21st now … that date’s lost,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Monday in confirming the new strategy. “The objective here is to try and get something that we could send back to the House that would open up the government.” Until Monday, GOP leaders had been hoping they could simply rubber-stamp the House-passed bill and deliver it to President Donald Trump’s desk — the swiftest path for ending the month-old partial government shutdown. The pivot toward a new bill means Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., would have to call the House back into session to hold another vote.

The House has been in recess since Sept. 19, when it passed its short-term stopgap bill. And Johnson had vowed not to call the House back into session until the government reopened, in an attempt to pressure Senate Democrats to vote for the House-passed bill. But more than six weeks later, Democrats have refused to cave and the partial shutdown is set to become the longest in history as of Wednesday. As a condition for reopening the government, Democrats have insisted on extending health insurance subsidies that are set to expire at year’s end and send premiums soaring.

Thune said he was optimistic that a deal could emerge to end the shutdown this week, though he was careful to hedge his bets. “If we don’t start seeing some progress, or some evidence of that by at least the middle of this week, it’s hard to see how we would finish anything by the end of the week,” he said. But before senators can draft a new stopgap measure, they must decide how long a new funding extension should last.

Read more: https://rollcall.com/2025/11/03/pressure-builds-to-punt-full-year-spending-bills-into-next-year/