Why Congress Bundles Spending Bills—And What Happens When They Split

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Two Americans are dead, shot by federal agents in Minneapolis. Senate Democrats now say they won’t fund the Department of Homeland Security unless body cameras, mask prohibitions, and independent shooting investigations become law. Senate Republicans refuse to separate DHS from a larger spending package that includes defense, healthcare, labor, transportation, and education. The government shuts down at midnight on January 30.

Senate Democrats are refusing to pass a six-bill spending package unless Department of Homeland Security funding gets separated out and reformed. Not delayed. Not amended. Separated entirely from the other five bills and rewritten to include body cameras on agents, prohibitions on masked enforcement operations, and independent investigations of shootings.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says that’s impossible without sending the entire package back to the House, which is on recess until February 2—two days after funding expires. The standoff is about whether bundling spending bills together gives leadership so much leverage that even fatal shootings of American citizens can’t break it apart.

The Bundling System: How Congress Stopped Passing Individual Spending Bills

Congress is supposed to pass twelve separate spending bills every year. Defense gets one bill. Health and Human Services gets another. Homeland Security, its own. Each bill goes through subcommittee hearings, markup sessions, floor debate, amendments. That’s what Congress set up in 1974 when it required annual budget planning and individual spending bills.

It hasn’t worked that way since 1997. That was the last time lawmakers passed all twelve bills by the October 1 deadline. In thirteen of the past fifteen years, legislators haven’t passed a single regular appropriation on time.

Instead, Congress started passing giant bundled spending bills that combine multiple departments together. Between 1986 and 2016, Congress passed 22 separate omnibus bills covering 19 different fiscal years, packaging anywhere from two to thirteen bills together. Nearly half of all appropriations during that period—170 out of 390—passed as part of bundled packages rather than standalone legislation.

Starting in the late 1970s and accelerating after 1980, bundling became standard practice. Today it’s how the government gets funded.

Why Leadership Uses Bundling as Leverage

Giant bundled spending bills work as leverage. Bundle DHS funding with defense appropriations, healthcare, transportation, labor, education, and suddenly voting against DHS means voting against everything else too. That’s the strategy.

If DHS operates as a standalone bill, it needs sixty votes to overcome a Senate rule that lets senators delay votes by talking. Republicans would need Democratic support. But packaged into a larger bill that includes defense funding and military family healthcare? Voting no means shutting down multiple departments, not one.

Bundling also enables hidden policy changes—rules that change how government works but have nothing to do with how much money agencies get. These provisions frequently wouldn’t pass on their own. But buried in a 2,000-page omnibus bill that funds the entire government? They become law because opposing the whole package becomes politically impossible.

Look at what got proposed for fiscal year 2024: provisions prohibiting pride flags from federal facilities, restricting abortion activities, limiting diversity programs, modifying immigration court procedures, affecting prison policy, restricting climate research, changing federal employee healthcare coverage, and addressing voting rights. None of that belongs in an appropriations bill.

Bundling concentrates power at the top. The four top leaders (two from each party, one from each chamber) negotiate what goes into giant spending packages. Not the smaller committees that normally review spending for each department. Not regular members of Congress. Leadership. Once leadership agrees, the minority party faces a choice: accept the package or trigger a shutdown.

That’s why Thune won’t split the bill. If the five non-DHS bills pass separately, Democrats get what they want—funded defense, healthcare, labor, transportation—without giving Republicans leverage on DHS. Separation destroys the bundling strategy.

The Minneapolis Shootings and DHS Reform Demands

On January 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Video shows him filming officers and helping a woman who’d been pushed to the ground. Agents pepper-sprayed him, tackled him, then shot him while he was on the pavement. Ten shots in less than five seconds.

Seventeen days earlier, federal agents had fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, also in Minneapolis, also during an immigration enforcement operation. Since September 2024, ICE agents have opened fire at least nine times across five states and Washington, D.C., killing four additional people.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled both Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” without evidence. Vice President J.D. Vance claimed Good had been “brainwashed” and was part of a “broader left-wing network.”

That rhetoric transformed the appropriations fight into something Democrats couldn’t ignore. Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota—whose state experienced both deaths—helped draft specific demands: body cameras on agents, visible identification, prohibitions on masks, stricter warrant procedures, coordination with local law enforcement, uniform codes of conduct with accountability, independent investigations of deaths.

Republicans suggested the Trump administration could address these concerns through executive action—new guidance on body cameras and investigation protocols without Congressional involvement. Democrats rejected this decisively. Executive promises without being written into law meant nothing from an administration whose officials had called American citizens terrorists. Executive action could be reversed through subsequent orders or guidance memos.

For Senate Democrats, particularly those from Minnesota, voting to fund DHS without securing reforms meant abandoning Americans killed by federal agents without even basic accountability measures.

The Procedural Problem: Why Splitting Isn’t Simple

The House already passed this as a six-bill bundle. The Senate can’t separate it, change the structure, and declare victory. A bill must pass both chambers in identical form before going to the president. Fundamental structural changes—like splitting a consolidated package into separate bills—create a new legislative proposal that requires House approval.

The House is on recess until February 2. The funding deadline is January 30 at midnight. Even if the Senate splits the bill today, it can’t become law without the House voting again.

The Senate could pass the five non-DHS bills immediately and negotiate DHS separately—either as a standalone bill or through a temporary funding measure at previous levels while talks continue. Schumer explicitly proposed this approach.

Thune refused. The package passes intact or not at all.

What Happens During a Shutdown

A government shutdown doesn’t mean everything stops. Social Security payments continue. Medicare and Medicaid operate normally. Military operations continue. Services that people pay for directly (like passport fees) keep running.

But a partial shutdown creates severe disruptions for specific agencies. If these six bills fail, the affected agencies include Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, Homeland Security, Treasury, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State, and the federal judiciary.

These departments would send home employees whose work isn’t critical to immediate operations without pay, while requiring others to work without paychecks. A 2019 law guarantees federal employees sent home without pay will eventually receive back pay, but the immediate impact is real: employees can’t pay mortgages, can’t buy groceries, face immediate financial hardship.

Air traffic controllers would work without pay. TSA officers at airports would work without paychecks. FDA inspectors couldn’t conduct food safety inspections. The IRS would furlough most of its workforce at the start of tax filing season, making it difficult for Americans to get answers and potentially delaying refunds. Medicare and Medicaid operations would slow, potentially delaying benefit determinations. Federal courts would exhaust their account balances and curtail activities.

Immigration enforcement presents a particular irony. While most non-critical DHS functions would cease, ICE and Border Patrol operations—classified as essential—would continue, with agents required to work without pay. Unpaid agents under greater stress arguably increases rather than decreases the risk of use-of-force incidents Democrats are trying to prevent.

When Shutdown Threats Lose Their Power

Bundling works when the threat of shutdown is sufficiently intense that the minority party accepts unfavorable terms to avoid it. That leverage disappears when external events create conditions where a significant portion of the minority cannot vote for the bill regardless of the shutdown threat.

Senate Democrats have determined that voting to fund DHS without securing reforms represents a fundamental capitulation on an issue where two Americans have been killed by federal agents and where official rhetoric labeled peaceful witnesses as terrorists. The threat of a shutdown can’t force capitulation because capitulation itself is unacceptable.

This happened before. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, President Trump’s insistence on border wall funding created a situation where neither party could compromise—Trump couldn’t accept funding without wall money, Democrats couldn’t accept wall funding. The shutdown lasted thirty-five days until Trump relented and agreed to a temporary spending bill without wall funding.

The dynamics are similar now, except the roles are reversed. Democrats are demanding specific policy changes in DHS funding. Republicans insist they won’t remove DHS from the package. When one party has genuine, non-negotiable objections to funding a specific agency without conditions, bundling that agency into a larger package doesn’t overcome the objection—it merely defers and intensifies the crisis.

The Temporary Funding Option

If the parties fail to reach agreement by January 30, Congress can pass a temporary funding measure. Congress has done this repeatedly since 1977.

A temporary funding measure funds the government at previous year’s levels for a limited period—generally weeks or months. It allows lawmakers to avoid shutdown while giving negotiators additional time to work out disagreements.

Lawmakers could pass a temporary measure funding DHS and the other five departments at fiscal year 2025 levels through mid-February or mid-March. That would buy time for the House to return from recess, for negotiations to continue on the substantive policy questions dividing the parties, and for either agreement on a new DHS funding bill with Democratic reforms or for the Trump administration to announce executive actions Democrats find sufficiently reassuring.

Thune indicated Republicans were prepared to accept a temporary measure if the parties couldn’t agree on the full package. But the duration and terms matter enormously. A several-month temporary bill provides continued opportunity for Democrats to press demands for DHS reform. A short-term resolution—weeks—allows Republicans to position the debate differently: that Democrats should vote for the full package rather than dragging out negotiations indefinitely.

The temporary funding option demonstrates that bundling isn’t the only mechanism available for funding the government. A third path—temporary funding while negotiations continue—remains available.

Implications for Future Budget Battles

If the Senate manages to split the DHS bill from the larger package—either through procedural maneuvers before January 30 or through a temporary measure that leaves DHS for separate negotiation—the precedent would have significant implications.

It would establish that a unified package isn’t unified if a significant coalition within one chamber objects strongly enough. It would show that the bundling strategy, while powerful, can be overcome through sustained political pressure, particularly when linked to external events and moral claims that resonate beyond purely partisan calculation.

Conversely, if Republicans successfully maintain the bundled package despite Democratic objections, it validates the bundling strategy as nearly unbreakable. It signals that even when a minority party has legitimate policy objections to agency funding, shutdown pressure will force acceptance rather than separation. That would likely encourage Republicans to continue packaging bills in future budget cycles.

The decision also has implications for congressional procedure more broadly. For decades, the trend has been toward consolidation—fewer individual bills, more giant packages, more centralized decision-making. A successful split by Democrats would reverse that trend, at least in this instance, and suggest that the balance of power isn’t entirely with the majority party in determining how bills are structured. It would empower future minority parties or coalitions to demand splitting of packages on issues where they have strong political leverage.

The Fundamental Question

The standoff over whether DHS funding should be separated from the larger package is a collision between two competing models of congressional governance.

One model: powerful legislative leadership centralizes control over appropriations by bundling bills into massive packages that individual members cannot easily oppose. The other: lawmakers operate through a more transparent, decentralized process where individual agencies and departments are funded through separate consideration and debate.

For nearly three decades, the trend has moved decisively toward bundling, centralization, and leadership control. Lawmakers abandoned the orderly system the 1974 Congressional Budget Act established in favor of giant packages, temporary measures, and crisis budgeting that shift power upward and concentrate discretion in leadership hands. The consequences have been substantial: the rise of contentious policy provisions that would never pass on their own merits, less time to carefully think through appropriation decisions, the elimination of opportunity for meaningful rank-and-file input into decisions, the creation of persistent shutdown threats.

The current crisis presents a moment where that bundling strategy faces a genuine test. Senate Democrats are demanding that DHS be separated from the larger package, driven by the deaths of two Americans at the hands of federal agents and by the Trump administration’s inflammatory response to those deaths. Whether they succeed depends on procedural complexity, on the resolve of both sides, and on whether the political pressure created by the Minneapolis shootings proves sufficient to overcome the strategic advantages of bundling.

The outcome will affect how lawmakers handle appropriations fights in the future. If bundling can be overcome, it may signal that the process is more flexible than it has appeared in recent years. If bundling holds firm, it validates the model of centralized, leadership-driven legislation that has characterized the past thirty years.

Either way, the debate illuminates a question about how Congress functions and who holds power over federal appropriations—a question about how much power the Constitution gives lawmakers and profound consequences for how responsive government is to its citizens and to the concerns of individual members. The answer arrives at midnight on January 30.

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