The House passes a CR with two months left on the clock.

A punt is a concession you make when you've run out of downs. The House made this one on first down. With more than two months left in the fiscal year and none of the twelve appropriations bills finished, it passed a continuing resolution funding the government at fiscal year 2026 levels through December 4th, largely on party lines. Appropriations Chair Tom Cole calls the bill clean. Steve Ellis and TCS Director of Research and Policy Josh Sewell take that word apart. Clean means no partisan poison pills. It does not mean neutral. Extending the current base level for the Pentagon, for the Justice Department, for every agency, is a choice about priorities — just one nobody has to vote on.

Then there's the White House anomalies list, transmitted before every CR. Some items are housekeeping: updating a program date, dropping funding for an inauguration three years away. Others are not. The list includes $1 billion to start building a Trump-class battleship whose design isn't finished — the same concurrent-design approach that produced an F-35 fleet fully mission capable about 30 percent of the time. It includes $3.2 billion in defense-wide procurement justified only by information available at a higher classification. And it would shield unobligated One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds from the standard 8 percent sequestration clawback, while the Pentagon sits on $89 billion of that money unspent and asks separately for $73 billion for the war with Iran.

Steve and Josh also dig into Senate Majority Leader Thune's threat to fall back on reconciliation if Democrats won't deal, the Lankford-Hassan bill that would make automatic two-week CRs painful enough to keep members in town and working, and the record underneath all of it: Congress has finished all twelve appropriations bills on time four times in more than fifty years. The last was 1997.