Understanding Continuing Resolutions vs. Regular Appropriations

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A continuing resolution (CR) is a temporary law that funds covered programs when Congress has not finished regular appropriations, the annual funding bills. From fiscal year 1977 through fiscal year 2025, Congress enacted 207 of them.

A CR can prevent a funding gap, during which agencies may be directed to shut down affected programs. But regular appropriations set the year’s funding decisions. A CR generally extends existing activity under temporary limits and bars agencies from using its money to start new activities.

What a CR funds and what regular appropriations decide

Regular appropriations provide budget authority for programs and agency activities for the next fiscal year. Budget authority permits an agency to enter financial agreements that commit the Treasury to make payments. The annual appropriations process sets the level of discretionary spending, meaning spending Congress controls through annual appropriations.

The federal fiscal year starts on October 1 and ends on September 30 of the following year. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees each have 12 parallel subcommittees, with each subcommittee responsible for one regular appropriations act. Congress can combine several appropriations bills into one legislative vehicle, commonly called an omnibus; a smaller combination is often called a minibus.

A CR usually identifies its covered activities by referring to earlier appropriations acts, especially activities whose new annual funding has not yet been enacted. The government operates under a CR when Congress has not finished the regular bills.

Congress enacted at least one CR in all but three of the fiscal years from 1977 through 2025. CRs have been used under many administrations, but each is a separate law; no single old resolution stays in force. Compare the actual coverage, expiration and exceptions in each law before treating two administrations’ CRs as the same policy.

Who turns a funding proposal into law

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution requires Treasury withdrawals to follow appropriations made by law. The House and Senate must pass the same legislative text before presenting it to the president for signature or veto. That applies to a CR as much as to a regular funding bill: Congress decides, and the president can sign or veto the result but cannot enact funding alone.

The president’s budget is a request to Congress expressing the administration’s priorities, rather than an enacted spending law. A congressional budget resolution sets a framework for budget decisions but is not a law, is not signed or vetoed by the president, and does not itself raise or spend money. Despite the similar name, a continuing resolution is a law and does provide funding.

A limit on total appropriations can be set under a budget resolution or an alternative measure. That amount is allocated to each chamber’s Appropriations Committee, which must divide it among its subcommittees. Those shares set boundaries for writing the funding bills.

Authorizing legislation can establish or continue an agency or program and set its policies, but an authorization does not by itself provide funding. Congress can nevertheless fund a program whose funding authorization has expired, unless a specific statutory requirement or contrary congressional intent prevents it.

How temporary funding works inside an agency

A CR’s funding rate is typically based on prior-year appropriations and prorated for the duration of the extension. In other words, an agency gets a slice of the prior year’s rate sized to the length of the CR, not a full year of money.

A typical CR ends when the applicable regular appropriations act becomes law or the CR’s expiration date arrives, whichever happens first. If the deadline arrives before regular funding is settled, Congress may enact another CR to prevent a funding gap.

CR funds generally cannot initiate or resume activities that were not funded in the previous year, although agencies can sometimes use still-available prior-year appropriations for new activities. Most CRs also require agencies to use their funding authority in the most limited way possible, preserving Congress’s later decisions on spending levels and priorities.

Apportionment controls how much of its funding an agency may use, an operating limit on top of the appropriation itself. During a short-term CR, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, uses a bulletin to automatically apportion a prorated share of funding as a lump sum. When an account should receive less than that automatic amount, so the agency does not get ahead of Congress’s final funding decisions, OMB must approve an apportionment specific to that account.

What Congress can change in a CR

Anomalies are provisions that supply additional funding, exceptions to a CR’s terms, or legislative changes for particular programs and activities. They can give an individual account a different amount or funding rate from the general formula.

Some CRs contain provisions that create, amend, or extend other laws. The Continuing Appropriations, Agriculture, Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Extensions Act, 2026, is one example. Its section 123 suspended certain expiration dates that the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 set in relation to the United States Parole Commission, from October 1, 2025, through February 13, 2026, the last date the act, as amended, lets its temporary funding run. The Commission’s authorities originally had an October 31, 1992, sunset date; a later extension authorized them until October 1, 2025.

A full-year CR provides continuing appropriations through the end of the fiscal year rather than only a short extension. That can remove the next short-term deadline, but funding still rests on earlier decisions rather than new ones.

Why temporary funding can create extra work and costs

The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that CRs created extra contracting actions and spending plans for Department of Defense personnel. Officials in the F-35 aircraft program estimated that 20 percent of their financial-management staff’s time went to adjusting budgets to manage CR constraints.

Joint Base San Antonio officials told GAO that a facilities-sustainment contract delayed by CR funding limits in fiscal year 2024 rose from an estimated $579,000 to a quoted $1,445,000 after final appropriations were enacted.

GAO cautioned that available data often did not allow a precise measure of the extent of CR effects on Defense operations. Officials have reported that CRs cost more in particular cases, but one contract’s price increase is not a government-wide price tag for using them.

In its review of selected Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services programs, GAO reported that CRs could slow hiring and create administrative burdens, but operations and services continued without major disruptions.

Officials administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program reported that the agency can request an exception apportionment. It lets grant recipients receive 90 percent of the previous year’s funding at the start of the next fiscal year, rather than the standard share provided during a CR. Some of those recipients also had access to state utility funds or state-budget funding to help manage disruptions. The exceptions and other available funds help explain why the same CR can produce different practical results across programs.

What happens when funding expires

A funding gap can begin at the start of a fiscal year or after a CR expires, and a shutdown may be partial when some regular appropriations are enacted but others are not. Federal agencies generally begin shutting down affected activities when funding does not appear likely to resume during the gap’s first calendar day. What matters for a particular activity is whether its own funding has lapsed, not whether Washington is using the word “shutdown.”

The Antideficiency Act generally bars federal officials from spending or committing more money than an appropriation makes available, and from committing the government to pay money before an appropriation is made, unless authorized by law. Its exceptions include emergencies involving the safety of human life or protection of property. A shutdown is therefore a set of legal restrictions on affected activities, not a command to stop everything the federal government does.

Some programs that pay benefits are funded by laws other than annual appropriations acts and may or may not be affected by a funding gap. The money for their payments may be available automatically under permanent appropriations even when the employees who process the payments are paid from annual appropriations. Historically, authority to keep administering some of those payments has been inferred from Congress’s direction that the benefits continue. The money for a payment and the staff work needed to deliver it have to be considered separately.

Excepted federal employees continue work that may legally be performed during a lapse, with agency lawyers and senior managers determining those designations. The statute defines a covered lapse as any appropriations lapse beginning on or after December 22, 2018. After a covered lapse ends, federal employees who were furloughed, or temporarily placed on unpaid leave, and excepted employees who were required to work must receive their standard pay. Payment comes at the earliest possible date after the lapse ends, subject to enactment of the appropriations ending it. A legal entitlement to later pay does not remove the immediate disruption of waiting for it.

Contractors are not covered by that back-pay guarantee, which comes from the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, and employers affected by paused contracts may reassign workers, place them on unpaid leave, or terminate employment.

Agency shutdown plans are posted on the agencies’ own websites. For a particular service or contract, check the agency’s plan and its instructions about that activity rather than assuming the whole department follows one rule.

Automatic funding and the limits of a stopgap

An automatic continuing resolution would make funding available when a gap occurs without requiring another congressional action at that moment. Such designs vary in their funding levels, covered activities, duration, and whether the mechanism itself expires.

One proposal is the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act of 2026, S. 4632. The bill would continue previously funded activities at the rate and under the conditions of the preceding applicable appropriations acts. Its funding would run for 14 calendar days and extend for another 14-day period if the lapse continued. During automatic funding, the bill would restrict official-travel spending for covered officers and employees, subject to exceptions. It would also bar motions to recess or adjourn for more than 23 hours, subject to its waiver rules.

The Senate placed S. 4632 on its legislative calendar on June 1, 2026. Placement on the calendar is a legislative step, not proof that automatic funding has become law. Use Congress.gov’s legislation search to find enacted funding laws and track a bill’s progress, amendments and committee activity.

Senators James Lankford, R-Okla., and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., reintroduced the bill, which their announcement says would take government shutdowns off the table and force Congress to stay in town until its work is done. Lankford presents it as protection for workers and services.

The 106th Congress ran from 1999 to 2001. In a report on a different, earlier bill, H.R. 853, the House Appropriations Committee predicted in the 106th Congress that automatic funding would favor existing spending levels by letting lawmakers who oppose changes block them without forcing a shutdown, the Congressional Research Service reported. An automatic mechanism could avoid a lapse yet leave the disagreement over new spending priorities unresolved.