Appropriations Bills

One of Congress's most important duties each year is to pass bills appropriating money to operate government agencies and programs. The Constitution says money cannot be drawn from the U.S. Treasury except “in consequence of appropriations made by law.” If Congress did not provide money in appropriations bills, the government would have to shut [Page 23]down. Brief shutdowns occur from time to time when Congress fails to appropriate funds in time, usually as a result of policy disputes with the president.

Appropriations bills provide legal authority to spend money previously approved in authorization bills, but they need not provide all of the money authorized and usually do not. This has often been a source of tension between authorizing committees and special-interest groups, which take pride in creating new government programs, and appropriators, who historically have seen themselves as guardians of the Treasury and frequently acted to limit the scope of programs by not fully funding them.

By custom, the House acts first on appropriations bills; the Senate revises the House version, although on occasion it has written its own separate measure.

Each year Congress must pass twelve regular appropriations bills by October 1 to fund the various parts of the federal government. About one half of federal spending each year is funded through this process. The other half is funded automatically, by the authority granted by laws governing entitlements and other mandatory programs, including interest on the national debt. Each of the regular appropriations bills covers one or more governmental functions—one bill covers defense, for example, while another covers labor, health and human services, and education (see list, p. 22).

In addition to regular appropriations bills, Congress usually passes one or more supplemental appropriations bills annually to provide funds for unbudgeted programs or events, or—more rarely—for ongoing events of special importance. By 2013, the most important example of the latter was Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked billions of dollars' worth of damage on several East Coast states in fall 2012. In previous years, Congress also passed numerous supplemental bills to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other notable examples include supplemental appropriations to fund the Persian Gulf War in 1991, for emergency urban aid after the Los Angeles riots in 1992, for farmers after severe crop and weather damage in the late 1990s, and for relief and rebuilding from devastation in many southern states, especially Louisiana, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

If one or more of the regular appropriations bills have not been enacted by October 1, Congress typically passes a continuing resolution to keep agencies operating temporarily. The continuing resolution may last only a few days or up to an entire fiscal year. It can cover one function or the whole government in an omnibus bill. A dramatic example occurred in 2007 when Democrats, who had just taken back control of Congress from Republicans after the 2006 elections, decided to fund most of the government for fiscal 2007, which would end at the end of September that year, through a continuing resolution. Only two regular bills for that year had cleared, one of them for defense and the other for homeland security. Democrats, newly in control, decided it was better to start with a fresh approach to appropriations by focusing on the fiscal 2008 bills rather than revisit the many conflicts and controversies in the unfinished 2007 bills.

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