How Congress Spends Your Money: Authorization vs. Appropriation

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In 2012 the Social Security Administration decided it had to shut down two of its grant programs. Congress had passed authorizations of appropriations for both, those authorizations had expired, and the agency read the expiration as an instruction to stop. It asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and GAO told it the reverse: there is “no general requirement that an authorization of appropriations precede an appropriation,” the enabling legislation already supplied the authority, and the agency could keep obligating the money it had.

A federal agency looked at an expired authorization and assumed the work had to stop. Its own auditor had to tell it to carry on. The distance between what an expired authorization sounds like and what it does is the whole of this subject.

So if you have just read that the authorization for a program you depend on has expired, here is the answer: your money almost certainly keeps coming. The appropriation is the law that actually pays, and the ban on funding a program whose authorization has lapsed is a rule Congress wrote for itself and waives as a matter of routine.

An appropriation passed without a current authorization is “just as valid, and just as available for obligation” as one with every box ticked, GAO’s lawyers write in the guide they use to settle exactly this question.

The exception is narrow, and it is the part worth knowing. Some programs run on a statute that carries the money itself, or that carries the agency’s authority to operate at all. When one of those expires, the work stops within days, and people notice.

Two laws, two jobs

The Constitution requires one law, not two. Article I, Section 9 says that “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Authorizations are not mentioned.

Congress added the second law itself, and gave it a different job. An authorizing statute exists, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) explains, to provide an agency with “authority and direction that allows it to administer a program,” and it hands over no money at all.

Inside that authorizing law there is usually a separate section, the authorization of appropriations, and this is the piece that expires. It may name a dollar figure for each of several fiscal years, or it may authorize such sums as may be necessary. Either way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told the Senate Budget Committee, “even when an explicit authorization of appropriations has expired, the organic legislation remains in effect.”

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act shows what that looks like in the statute book. Section 6302 of title 20 authorizes appropriations for grants to school districts in four listed years, the last of them “$16,182,344,591 for fiscal year 2020,” and then it stops. The program did not stop.

Three things are easy to run together here. The organic law is the program’s license to exist. The authorization of appropriations is Congress advising itself how much to spend. The appropriation is the money, and it is the only one of the three the Treasury needs to see.

GAO put the governing rule in one sentence: there is “no general requirement, either constitutional or statutory, that an appropriations act be preceded by a specific authorization of appropriations.”

Rule XXI says no, and then the House votes to set Rule XXI aside

The prohibition people have in mind is real, and it is a House rule rather than a law. Clause 2 of Rule XXI provides that an appropriation may not be reported in a general appropriation bill “for an expenditure not previously authorized by law.”

On September 14, 2004, Representative C.W. Bill Young of Florida stood up and used it. Reading the rule aloud during House consideration of an appropriations bill, he said of the item running from page 25 to page 26: “this program is not authorized by law.” The chair agreed with him. “The burden of demonstrating authorization has not been met,” the chair ruled, sustaining the point of order and striking the paragraph from the bill.

That is the rule working as designed, and it is also why it so seldom bites. Somebody has to be on the floor, watching for the item, and willing to strike a colleague’s program.

CRS sets out what follows either way. Where a point of order is sustained, “the provision is stricken from the bill,” though the bill itself goes on. And the prohibition “may be waived by unanimous consent, pursuant to the bill’s consideration under suspension of the rules, or under the terms of a special rule.”

The special rule is the routine path. Before the House debates an appropriations bill it votes on a resolution setting the terms of debate, and that resolution can switch the prohibition off in a line. For the fiscal 2024 Energy and Water bill, the Rules Committee reported a resolution that “waives all points of order against provisions in the bill, as amended.” The report’s own list of what that covers opens with clause 2(a) of rule XXI, the one that prohibits unauthorized appropriations.

A ban that a member has to invoke by hand, and that the majority can switch off in advance with a vote it was taking anyway, is not much of a ban. It is a bargaining chip, held mostly by whoever writes the rule for debate.

The annual list nobody reads

Congress does keep score on itself. Under a 1985 amendment to the Congressional Budget Act, CBO must report each year, by January 15, on programs funded without an authorization of appropriations. The requirement sits in the U.S. Code, at 2 U.S.C. 602(e)(3), and asks for two lists: the programs funded in a fiscal year with no authorization enacted for it, and the ones whose authorizations expire at the end of that year.

The count takes in only programs whose “explicit authorization of appropriations has expired,” CBO notes, because the organic statute underneath usually never expires at all.

On February 3, 2016, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing with a title that reads like an admission: “Appropriations With Expired Authorizations.” CBO Director Keith Hall was the witness, and he reported $310 billion of that year’s appropriations going to programs whose explicit authorization of appropriations had expired, more than half of it to programs that had been unauthorized for more than a decade.

The number has grown. For fiscal 2025, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, reporting CBO’s tally, found that “roughly 457 unauthorized programs received nearly $500 billion.” Just 23 laws accounted for $450 billion of that, and the oldest expired authorization on the list dates to 1980. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, reading an earlier CBO report, counted $290.8 billion appropriated in a single year for programs Congress had failed to reauthorize.

Those three counts all come out of the same annual CBO exercise, reported by different people in different years, so read them as a trend rather than as a disagreement.

Familiar agencies sit on the list. The National Institutes of Health received $31 billion in fiscal 2010 with no reauthorization since the 109th Congress, in 2005 and 2006, and the U.S. Agency for International Development received $18.9 billion without a reauthorization since the 99th Congress, in 1985-86.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act shows the pattern over time: appropriations for most of its programs were authorized through fiscal 2007, and because the programs kept receiving annual appropriations, CRS records, they are “considered implicitly authorized.”

Implicitly authorized is a courteous phrase for funded out of habit. For most people who depend on one of these programs, habit is why the check arrives.

The lapse that reached a jobsite in Oakland

On July 22, 2011, two powers of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) expired together: the authority to collect aviation trust fund revenues, and the authority to spend money in the trust fund.

That pairing is the difference. An ordinary lapsed authorization of appropriations leaves the appropriation untouched, so the agency keeps paying. This lapse took the money from both ends at once: the tax stopped coming in, and the authority to pay it out went with it.

The FAA stopped construction work at airports and air traffic control facilities and furloughed almost 4,000 employees effective July 23, 2011. The partial shutdown ran almost two weeks, ending on August 5, 2011, when the Senate passed H.R. 2553 by unanimous consent and the President signed it that day.

An electrician in his 50s was helping build the new air traffic control tower at Oakland International Airport. He was one of 60 engineers and contractors laid off there. He had spent 22 years at a local auto assembly plant before it shut down and had not found much work since, so the tower job carried more than a wage: it kept his union medical coverage in force.

“My medical is about $1,400 a month, and if I’m not working then that has to be paid by somebody, or else I don’t have medical coverage for me and my family,” he told NPR, the public radio network.

Nobody voted to lay him off. A deadline passed while the House and the Senate disagreed, and the effect of it landed on a construction site in Oakland.

Flood insurance: claims paid, closings stopped

The National Flood Insurance Program shows the same mechanism closer to home. Should its authorization lapse, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says it keeps the authority “to ensure the payment of valid claims with available funds,” but it “would stop selling and renewing policies for millions of properties.” Citing the National Association of Realtors, FEMA estimates that a lapse might touch about 1,300 property sales each day, roughly 40,000 closings a month.

If you already hold a policy, a lapse does not cancel it. If you are trying to buy in a flood zone, it stops you at the closing table.

That is where one out-of-state buyer found herself. She had flown in from Houston to close on a second-floor condo in a part of New Orleans with no history of flooding, and when everyone sat down the lender refused to issue the mortgage, because the condo had no flood insurance and could not get any. Her attorney told Fox News that she offered to escrow the money, the lender wouldn’t accept, and she drove back to Houston to wait for Congress to reauthorize the program.

This is not a shutdown

An expired authorization and a lapse in appropriations are different events with different laws behind them, and only one of them sends federal workers home.

The Antideficiency Act is what makes a shutdown a shutdown. It forbids an officer or employee from making or authorizing “an expenditure or obligation exceeding an amount available in an appropriation or fund,” and from committing the government to pay money “before an appropriation is made unless authorized by law.”

Which is why the Office of Management and Budget requires every agency head, working with the general counsel, to keep a plan for “an orderly shutdown in the event of a lapse in appropriations” on file, updated at least every two years. The trigger in Circular A-11 is the appropriation running out. Not the authorization.

In the shutdown that began on December 22, 2018, and ended on January 25, 2019, five of the twelve regular appropriations bills for fiscal 2019 had already been enacted. The agencies those five covered had their money, so they stayed open while the rest closed.

An expired authorization sets none of this in motion. The appropriation is still sitting there, so the Antideficiency Act has nothing to bite on.

When the authorization is the money: highways, the farm bill, CHIP

Some programs never get their money through the annual appropriations bill in the first place. For those, the authorizing statute is the money, and its expiry is not symbolic.

Federal highway aid runs on contract authority. When the Federal Highway Administration obligates it for a project, that “legally commits the federal government to reimburse the state for the federal share of a project,” and CRS notes this can be done before any appropriation exists. A separate annual ceiling, the obligation limitation, caps how much may be committed in a year and is, in the same report’s words, “analogous to an appropriation.”

Let the surface transportation authorization lapse and there is no new contract authority to obligate. The reimbursements that state highway departments live on stop arriving, and no appropriations bill is sitting behind them to keep the pipeline full.

The farm bill fails in a stranger way. Farm bills suspend a set of commodity laws from 1938 and 1949 that never expire, known as permanent law, and if the suspension runs out the U.S. Department of Agriculture “would be required to implement permanent law, which is likely more expensive to the government and consumers than the current farm bill.” That old law would support dairy, wheat, rice, cotton, and corn, and would leave soybeans, peanuts and sugar out.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program put the same point in front of families. Authorization for spending on the program expired at the end of September 2017, and by late November Colorado health officials were mailing letters to the people enrolled in the state program, urging them to start researching private insurance in case Congress did not act. More than 75,000 children in Colorado and almost 800 pregnant women were covered by it.

Colorado was not warning those families because a rule had been broken somewhere in the House. It was warning them because the funding written into the statute had run out, and nothing else was scheduled to replace it.

Who gains when an authorization lapses

Power does not evaporate in a lapse. It moves.

House Rule X gives the Committee on Appropriations three things and no more: “Appropriation of the revenue for the support of the Government,” rescissions of appropriations, and transfers of unexpended balances. Everything substantive is supposed to belong to an authorizing committee.

When the authorizing committee goes quiet, the appropriators become the only committee still legislating on that program every year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget describes the result without flinching: Congress relies “on appropriators to essentially reauthorize them by funding them.”

They have the tools for it. A limitation in an appropriations bill restricts “the amount, purpose, or availability of funds without changing existing law,” which lets a spending bill switch off an activity it has no power to repeal. The line it may not cross is making or changing law, and crossing it draws a point of order of its own.

Authorizers notice. On December 6, 2004, Senate Finance chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking member Max Baucus wrote to Appropriations chairman Ted Stevens, ranking member Robert Byrd and the leaders of the Transportation and Treasury subcommittee about the fiscal 2005 omnibus.

The provision that set them off, section 222, would have given the chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees unrestricted access to tax returns. Section 222, they wrote, was “not the only infringement by the appropriators into the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee,” and they listed the other tax, trade and entitlement provisions they had found in the bill.

Read that letter as a description of incentives and it explains the arrangement. The committee that funds a program every year ends up shaping it, whatever the jurisdiction table says.

Authorizers say they lose something too. Senator Rand Paul, chairing a Senate subcommittee hearing on unauthorized appropriations in October 2019, said oversight is “anemic at best if there is no threat of legislative action,” because Congress acts by passing laws.

The case for a deadline with teeth

One fix keeps coming back. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington re-introduced her Unauthorized Spending Accountability Act as H.R. 2505 in May 2019, to put unauthorized programs on a path to sunset in three years unless Congress renewed them, with budget reductions along the way. Unauthorized appropriations are “part of the untold frustration that we often hear from the citizens, the hardworking taxpayers that we represent,” she said.

The mechanics are arithmetic. In the first fiscal year after an authorization expires, under the version of the bill introduced in the 114th Congress, “not more than an amount equal to 90 percent of the funds appropriated for such program in the expiring fiscal year may be obligated.” In the second and third years the ceiling drops to 85 percent of the funds appropriated in that last authorized year, the excess is rescinded, and at the end of the third year the program terminates unless it is reauthorized.

In plain terms, if you run a school district office or a nonprofit on one of these grants: the money shrinks the year after the authorization lapses, shrinks again, and then stops, unless your authorizing committee moves a bill.

The argument behind that is not really about money. Under the Congressional Budget Act, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation notes, appropriating for expired authorizations is technically disfavored, but “in practice, it happens routinely and at scale.” That is the reformers’ case in one line: a rule broken at that volume has stopped being a rule.

Representative Tom McClintock proposed getting there without new legislation. In a May 2016 memo to the Speaker’s Organizational Task Force, he asked the House to direct all authorizing committees to “identify any expired or soon to expire programs within their jurisdictions and to adopt a timetable” for reauthorizing them, and to stop the Rules Committee reporting waivers of clause 2(a) for programs past that date.

The oversight version of the complaint is simpler. The rules against funding unauthorized programs exist, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget observes, and they “are often waived.”

The case that expiring is a choice, not a failure

Not everyone reads a forced sunset as oversight. Caroline Lynch, arguing from the record of sunset clauses in surveillance law, contends that deadlines do not produce review so much as brinkmanship. Legislating foreign intelligence law with short-term extensions and missed deadlines, she writes, “creates unnecessary work and political controversy for Congress,” and passing a bill through both chambers, “even a bill that does nothing more than change a date, consumes valuable time and resources.”

Her point travels uncomfortably well. A deadline that can kill a program is leverage for whoever is willing to let it die, and the price of renewal gets paid in whatever the holdout wants that year.

The appropriators have a case of their own, and at its strongest it is not a dodge. A reauthorization comes around at long intervals and often does not come at all, while an appropriations bill revisits the program every single year, with a dollar figure attached and a subcommittee that has to defend it in public.

When authorizers do not act, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts it, “it is left to appropriators to determine if funding should continue.” On that view the annual bill is the review, conducted more often than the rulebook’s version, just by the wrong committee.

The record of attempts to change any of this is short. Congress created a Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform, and its draft’s chief recommendation was for “the budget resolution to be adopted for a two-year cycle” instead of an annual one.

At a markup that concluded on November 29, 2018, the bill was not agreed to, by one aye and seven noes among the appointees of the Speaker and the Senate majority leader, and seven ayes and zero noes among the minority leaders’ appointees.

The committee’s own voting rule required separate majorities from each party’s appointees, so a split like that ended it. Everyone agreed the process was broken. Nobody agreed on the repair.

How to check your own program

Five documents will tell you where a specific program stands, and none of them sit behind a subscription.

Start with the statute. Find the program’s authorization of appropriations section in the U.S. Code and read the last fiscal year in the list: 20 U.S.C. 6302 authorizes appropriations to carry out the activities described in part A for four years ending with fiscal year 2020, and that last year is the expiration, sitting in plain sight.

Next, look up CBO’s annual report on expired and expiring authorizations. It lists the programs and activities “funded each year without an authorization of appropriations,” and it is due by January 15.

A GAO compilation, GAO-25-107294, does the same job account by account, covering the 17 Cabinet agencies subject to the Chief Financial Officers Act, as their accounts appeared in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.

For the money itself, read the enacted appropriations act on govinfo, arranged by division, then agency, then account heading, with a dollar figure and a period of availability. Detail below that level lives in the joint explanatory statement, which the law pulls in by reference, and that is where the named tables of individual projects sit.

Then read your own agency’s congressional budget justification, the way the Department of Education’s fiscal 2025 request laid it out: an authorizing legislation table, with a footnote saying that the extension expired and that “Reauthorization for FY 2025 is expected through appropriations action.”

The question to ask about your own program is not whether the authorization expired. Hundreds of programs are in that position in any given year and they are paid anyway. Ask instead where the money comes from.

If it arrives through the annual appropriations bill, an expired authorization is a fight between committees and your check is not part of it. If the statute that expired is the one handing out the money, or the one letting the agency operate at all, the lapse is yours, and you will know within days.