Congressional inertia, and the limits of a popular president

THE SENATE has passed a stopgap spending bill that keeps the government open for another three months — and strips President Trump of several policy ambitions in the process. On August 8th, after advancing the measure with an 89-4 vote earlier in the week, the chamber approved a continuing resolution that funds federal agencies through December 11 at current levels. The bill leaves out the SAVE America Act, which Mr Trump wanted attached. It denies the administration authority to redirect funds to the Border Patrol. It blocks a proposed rule that would have required senior political appointees to review federal grants for alignment with presidential priorities. And it omits $1bn in funding for new "Trump-class" battleships.

The arithmetic is less about ideology than about calendars. The bill avoids a shutdown that would otherwise begin on October 1st — two months before the November 3rd midterm elections. That timing makes it a deal both parties want. Lawmakers have endured two record shutdowns in the past ten months, including a 43-day lapse and a 76-day resolution for the Department of Homeland Security. Nobody wants a third. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, identified passage as a top priority so that legislators could head into August recess and focus on reelection campaigns without the distraction of furloughs and closed national parks. Democrats were equally keen to prevent Mr Trump from claiming that the opposition held the government hostage.

The real question the bill reveals is not whether Mr Trump can get what he wants — he clearly cannot — but how much authority a president commands when his own Senate majority refuses to hand it to him. The most illuminating detail is the grant rule. Mr Trump's administration proposed a policy under which senior political appointees would review grant proposals to judge whether they advance the president's agenda. It would have turned federal grant-making into a tool of partisan preference, rewarding states and universities that bent toward the White House and penalising those that did not. Senators Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, and Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, blocked the rule from taking effect during the stopgap period, citing concerns about the politicisation of grants and harm to biomedical research and rural communities. That they could do so — and that no amount of executive pressure could overcome them — is a reminder that appropriations are where presidential ambition meets institutional friction.

Mr Trump and Mr Thune reached a separate accommodation on the same day. A budget resolution and part of the SAVE America Act have been shelved until after the August recess. The arrangement is a classic political punt: avoid a public confrontation before the midterms and kick the harder fights to December, when election results will have reshaped the political landscape. Whether the Senate returns with a stronger Republican hand or a chastened one will determine whether the president gets his border transfers and grant overhaul, or simply another extension of the status quo.

To be sure, continuing resolutions are not inherently undemocratic. They are a mechanism for avoiding chaos when consensus is absent, and a brief one that preserves current spending levels is less distortive than a shutdown that severs paycheques, halts contract work, and disrupts food programmes. The Senate's version is cleaner than the House's, which had allowed the administration greater latitude to move money toward the Border Patrol. That the Senate chose to impose restrictions rather than rubber-stamp the executive's preferences is, on its face, a sign of legislative seriousness.

Yet the deeper problem is not this week's bill. It is the fact that Congress has now normalised the continuing resolution as its default mode of governance. When appropriations are reduced to a sequence of short-term extensions, spending becomes inert by design. Agencies do not receive the clarity they need to plan multi-year programmes. Contractors hesitate to hire. Researchers delay submissions. The government runs on autopilot while the legislature defers every substantive choice to a later date that keeps being postponed. The result is not accidental; it is built into a system where neither side can credibly threaten the other with a shutdown because both fear the electoral consequences.

The cost will not fall evenly. Bureaucracies adapt to uncertainty by doing less. Discretionary programmes that lack emergency status get squeezed first. Small grants to state universities, community colleges and rural hospitals are the first to stall when political appointees cannot sign off and agency staff are working under rolling extensions. That is why Ms Collins and Ms Murray drew the line on the grant rule: they knew that turning discretionary grants into a political football would compound the damage that perpetual stopgaps already do.

A wiser approach would be to pass the full-year appropriations that are overdue and negotiate the president's policy preferences separately. If Mr Trump wants new battleships, a case for them can be made on national-security grounds rather than by attaching them to a funding bill and holding agencies hostage. If the administration wants to reshape how grants are awarded, it should do so through legislation subject to debate and amendment, not through a rule embedded in a stopgap that appropriators will strip out the moment they can. The December 11th deadline will present another test. The better answer is to treat it as the end of the deferral habit, not the beginning of another round of it.

Presidents who cannot get their own majority to pass a budget are not powerful. They are merely loud. Consumers pay first — but this time, the first cost is the quality of government itself.