Congress Attached Policy Demands to Funding Bills. That’s Not New—But It Is Risky.

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The immediate trigger was familiar: disagreement over how much money to spend. But the fight is about something Congress has been doing since the 1870s—adding unrelated requirements to bills that must pass.

The result is a test of whether the minority party can use “must-pass” legislation to pressure a President to achieve policy goals that might struggle to pass on their own merits.

How Appropriations Requirements Became Routine

The strategy accelerated dramatically starting in the 1970s. The Hyde Amendment, enacted in 1976, shows how durable these requirements can be. It prohibited federal funding for abortion in most circumstances, and it’s been reattached to appropriations bills every year since—effectively becoming permanent law through repetition. That precedent emboldened subsequent generations of legislators to use appropriations bills as vehicles for policy change they couldn’t achieve through normal legislation.

During the Reagan and Bush presidencies, appropriations requirements took on heightened significance as tools for executive-legislative combat. By the 1990s, policy changes through appropriations bills had become standard.

Why Legislators Keep Doing This

Ordinary legislation rarely passes. When the normal legislative process is broken, requirements become one of the few mechanisms for achieving anything. Most policy requirements would typically be included in bills that create new programs or policies, but Congress rarely passes those bills anymore. Appropriation bills have become “the last train to leave the Congressional station at the end of the year.” They must pass. If Congress does not enact appropriations, portions of the government shut down.

This creates a situation where one side has more power than the other. A member can attach a policy requirement to a must-pass appropriations bill, knowing that the President faces a terrible choice between signing legislation containing an objectionable provision or precipitating a government shutdown.

The mechanism has proven powerful across the political spectrum. Requirements can serve as sweeteners that party leaders use to persuade reluctant fence-sitters to vote for underlying appropriation bills. Some observers have characterized requirements as a form of “legislative blackmail,” where strategically positioned members can force the adoption of minority positions by threatening to block funding.

Democrats Deploy a Historically Republican Tactic

The current DHS standoff represents a notable shift: it’s one of the first major instances of the Democratic minority using appropriations leverage to demand policy changes from a Republican-controlled government. Historically, Republicans have deployed this tactic more aggressively. In 2011, House Republicans attempted to defund Planned Parenthood through an appropriations requirement, forcing a crisis when Democrats and President Obama refused.

When Requirements Succeed and When They Fail

While requirements can force negotiations and extract concessions, they rarely achieve their original, uncompromised policy goals. The critical pattern: appropriations requirements succeed as policy instruments only when they have sufficient political support that they can weather legislative negotiations and potential executive branch opposition. Requirements attempting to force dramatic policy reversals against the will of either the President or a legislative coalition tend to fail, resulting instead in closures, temporary funding measures, and unsatisfying compromises.

The Institutional Damage

Budget experts express deeper concerns about appropriations requirements becoming the main way Congress makes policy. The frequency of government closures and near-closures has accelerated markedly. This pattern reflects what budget experts characterize as the breakdown of Congress’s normal budget process. The original Budget Act of 1974 established a framework intended to give Congress systematic procedures for evaluating presidential budgets, setting fiscal priorities, and passing appropriations in orderly fashion.

Instead, Congress has increasingly relied on temporary funding that freezes agency budgets at last year’s levels and giant spending bills that fund many agencies at once. Rather than deliberating on individual appropriations subcommittees’ budgets, Congress increasingly bundles multiple agencies’ funding into single, take-it-or-leave-it votes. This concentration of power strengthens the hand of legislative leadership and makes attaching requirements more effective: a requirement embedded in a 2,000-page omnibus appropriations bill is far harder to excise than the same provision in a targeted, single-agency bill subject to methodical committee scrutiny.

This has consequences for federal agency planning and effectiveness. Agencies operating under temporary funding can’t plan hiring, start new projects, or make long-term decisions. The Department of Commerce has had to delay or cancel critical field testing of modernized surveying technology due to temporary funding, creating negative downstream impacts on the quality of household and economic survey data that Congress, other government agencies, and the business community depend on. Federal agency budgets become frozen at outdated levels, with no flexibility to respond to changing priorities, inflation, or new circumstances.

Leadership now conducts budget negotiations in private with the President, largely excluding rank-and-file members and committees. “When you shut them out of the process, you wind up with ill-considered legislation. We’re not getting as good a legislative product as we deserve.”

Constitutional Tensions Over Spending Power

The rise of appropriations requirements generates constitutional tensions between the power of the purse and the President’s executive authority. The Constitution says Congress controls federal spending—this is its core power. Yet the Constitution also says the President must enforce laws, which gives the President flexibility in how to carry out spending decisions. These constitutional provisions can conflict when Congress uses appropriations requirements to dictate how the executive branch executes discretionary functions.

President Rutherford B. Hayes attacked appropriations requirements in 1879, claiming that Congress effectively negated the President’s veto power by attaching requirements unrelated to the main bill. “The executive will no longer be what the framers of the Constitution intended,” Hayes argued, because attachment of requirements unrelated to the main bill made it impossible for the President to use the veto power without “stopping all of the operations of the government.”

This constitutional objection has echoed through the decades. The Reagan administration asserted that laws restricting aid to Nicaragua rebels went beyond Congress’s authority and limited the President’s control over foreign policy. President Bush’s Attorney General Dick Thornburgh attacked appropriations requirements in 1990 as “clearly limiting the President’s ability to run the executive branch as he sees fit.”

Yet defenders argue that Congress controls the power to spend money, not the executive, and the use of appropriations requirements is a legitimate and necessary tool for defending against executive intrusions into lawmaking powers. Congress can choose to specify the purposes for which funds are not to be used, even if that purpose has been previously authorized. When the Carter administration’s Internal Revenue Service sought to deny tax-exempt status to private schools with inadequate minority enrollments, Congress enacted restrictions on how money can be spent as a stopgap measure. Similarly, when the Federal Communications Commission sought to reexamine its affirmative action guidelines during the Reagan administration, Congress enacted a restriction in 1987 to check this initiative. That Congress used these restrictions to constrain both Carter and Reagan initiatives suggests the device is “neither liberal nor conservative, Republican nor Democratic.”

Constitutional scholars have sought to articulate principled boundaries, suggesting a requirement violates separation of powers only if it significantly limits a power the Constitution gives to another branch. Yet this standard offers little practical guidance in specific cases.

How Other Democracies Handle This

In parliamentary systems like the UK, Canada, and Australia, the executive branch depends on the legislature’s support to stay in power. This structural difference eliminates the winner-take-all budget fights characteristic of American government with separate powers. When the British Parliament withholds funding from government operations, it is simultaneously voting no confidence in the government, which forces new elections and government formation. This high cost discourages both the executive and opposition from using appropriations as a routine bargaining tool over policy disputes.

Germany’s federal system, while parliamentary in structure, also demonstrates an alternative approach. German spending bills focus on spending, not controversial policy changes, with policy disputes typically resolved through separate legislative vehicles. Regular coordination between federal and state governments reduces the need for last-minute appropriations-based negotiations.

The United States’ system where Congress and the President have separate powers creates conditions where appropriations leverage becomes particularly valuable. The President cannot dissolve Congress to gain a new legislature more aligned with executive preferences, and Congress cannot remove the President simply by withholding funds. This structural stalemate creates incentives for the minority party to use spending bills to pressure a President of the opposite party.

The Political Calculus

The success or failure of the current Democratic strategy on DHS funding will likely hinge on several factors. First is the question of public opinion. Historically, closures have tended to damage whoever the public perceives as responsible for the impasse. The 1995-1996 closures, precipitated by Republican requirements that President Clinton accept cuts, damaged Republicans politically, with public opinion shifting decisively toward Clinton by the time the closure ended.

The current closure differs in a key respect: the Democratic requirements involve limiting how the executive branch enforces immigration law, an area where public opinion is more divided. Republicans may argue that Democratic ICE reforms are like cutting police funding and endangering national security—a framing that could resonate with portions of the electorate. Democrats counter that they are requiring transparency and constitutional compliance in immigration enforcement.

A second factor is whether the separated DHS funding creates structural advantage for Democrats in negotiations. Two weeks of temporary DHS funding means that Democrats can return to negotiations with leverage when the interim period expires, while Republicans face a new closure threat. Historically, whoever controls when temporary funding runs out and negotiations restart maintains leverage in ongoing negotiations.

A third factor is whether fellow Republicans will pressure their leadership to accept some Democratic requirements or proceed toward a new closure. Some Republican senators have indicated openness to specific reforms. Senator Lindsey Graham suggested that Republicans could accept independent investigations into ICE use of force, though Graham remained opposed to more stringent requirements like mandatory judicial warrants for immigration arrests. This may indicate room for a deal, though the parties still disagree on major points.

Prospects for Reform

Unless Congress makes major changes to its rules, requirements will likely remain central to legislative politics. The obstacles to reform are substantial. House and Senate rules already prohibit policy changes, yet reform would require majorities in both chambers to actually enforce these rules instead of ignoring them. Enforcement would require members to formally block requirements and prevent leadership from waiving the rules.

Leadership from both parties has consistently found it advantageous to permit requirements because requirements let leaders convince reluctant members to vote yes by adding things they want. “The trick with must-pass bills is Members can use them as an opportunity to attach policy changes, even if those policies would be difficult to pass on their own,” as one expert summarized the incentive structure. As long as must-pass legislation exists—and appropriations bills will always be must-pass because the alternative is government closure—and as long as individual members have policy priorities they cannot advance through normal legislative channels, requirements will remain attractive.

To restore normal budget procedures, leadership in both chambers would need to commit to passing individual appropriations bills through standard procedures by October 1, so Congress doesn’t need emergency spending bills at the last minute. Yet past efforts at reform have repeatedly failed. The 1974 Budget Act was supposed to create order, but Congress has mostly ignored it since 1997.

The current temporary funding framework, extended through January 30, 2026, represents another temporary bridge that likely will be followed by new emergency appropriations legislation. Unless both chambers and the President commit to following the formal budget process, the cycle of temporary funding, omnibus bills, appropriations crises, and legislative requirements will continue.

The Long-Term Cost

The current government closure represents the latest iteration of a pattern stretching back to the 19th century: using appropriations leverage to force policy changes that might not survive normal legislative deliberation. What has changed is the frequency, stakes, and institutional damage of these confrontations. Government closures that once required extraordinary political conflict to precipitate now occur regularly. Federal agencies operate under temporary funding for months or years, freezing budgets at outdated levels.

The strategy of attaching policy requirements to appropriations bills can succeed in extracting negotiations and forcing compromises, as the Democrats are attempting with DHS. But historical experience suggests such tactics rarely achieve their full policy objectives without substantial compromise, and they often damage the political standing of whichever party pursues them most aggressively when public opinion perceives the closure as unnecessary obstruction.

A Congress that makes most major decisions through budget crises rather than normal legislative processes is increasingly unable to thoughtfully discuss how to spend money and set priorities in orderly fashion. Returning to the normal process requires political will and commitment that has proven elusive since 1997.

Whether Democrats’ current gambit on DHS funding succeeds or fails, the pattern of which it represents—using must-pass legislation as leverage for policy requirements—seems likely to persist until Congress reforms its fundamental budget process. That reform appears unlikely in the near term, suggesting that future government closures will remain fixtures of American political life.

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