When the House and Senate return from their month-long August recess, lawmakers will have just four weeks to avert a government shutdown — and some kind of kick-the-can funding patch is all but guaranteed.

Before the Senate adjourned Saturday evening, the chamber passed the first bipartisan spending package of the year. But on the other side of the Capitol, House Republicans have yet to welcome government funding negotiations with Democrats, after spending the summer stiff-arming them by advancing bills with steep cuts and conservative mandates.

The mood on Capitol Hill already wasn’t ripe for a major bipartisan breakthrough this fall on government funding, given the Republican capitulation to President Donald Trump’s moves to undercut billions of dollars Congress has already approved. Now fiscal conservatives say House GOP leaders promised them no funding will be increased, while dozens of Republicans are demanding earmarks and Democrats are weighing ultimatums like re-upping Obamacare funding as a condition of passing legislation in September to keep federal operations afloat.

“It’s a lot of uncharted territory here in terms of the posture of the minority and the majority, and the president’s priorities,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said in a brief interview. “If you like chaos, then you’re seeing a lot of it.”

Adding to the bedlam on Capitol Hill ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown cliff, White House budget director Russ Vought is vocalizing plans to sabotage the bipartisan funding negotiations he openly scorns. His tool of choice could be to send more requests to claw back funding lawmakers previously enacted after reaching cross-party compromise.

Vought is privately strategizing with members of the House Freedom Caucus and the right flank of the Senate GOP conference, while Democrats and even some Republican senators warn such a move would poison the well before the Oct. 1 shutdown deadline.

“It’s hard to imagine someone being more disruptive of the appropriating process than the current OMB director,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a top appropriator, said in an interview. “If he is determined to drive us into a partisan shutdown, he ought to just tell the country. In the meantime, on a bipartisan basis, the senators of the Appropriations Committee are continuing to try and do our jobs and keep the government open.”

The best-case scenario for lawmakers rooting for a bipartisan compromise is that the Senate’s passage of a three-bill package on Friday ends up spurring a deal with the House this fall. Then Congress could clear a hybrid bill that provides a full year of fresh funding for some agencies and runs the rest of the government on autopilot budgets for a few weeks or months, buying more time to wrap up the full slate of a dozen bills that fund the government each year.

The top Senate and House appropriators, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, are expected to negotiate over the next month, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he will be in touch with Speaker Mike Johnson to prepare for the fall funding fight too.

GOP leaders are also talking with the White House. But nobody has locked in a government funding plan they can present to congressional Republicans for buy-in.

House conservatives would likely harangue Johnson if he agrees to go along with any package that doesn’t cut or at least freeze funding. They are also demanding that funding clawbacks are not counted toward topline spending reductions.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said on social media last month that the “deal” to get House fiscal conservatives to support final passage of the GOP domestic policy megabill in July was that funding for the new fiscal year would be “at or below” current levels. “That is already negotiated,” insisted Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus.

The House and Senate are already endorsing drastically different funding levels in the appropriations bills they have been able to advance so far. The funding measures House Republicans rolled out earlier this summer would meet spending-cut demands by cleaving non-defense agencies by almost 6 percent overall and keeping the Pentagon’s budget flat. Senate lawmakers, on the other hand, have proposed $20 billion more for the military and at least modest funding increases for most non-defense agencies.

If House conservatives get their way in September, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will be under intense pressure from his base to threaten a government shutdown unless the GOP agrees to some concessions. Republicans need Democratic votes in the Senate for any legislation to clear the 60-vote procedural hurdle to move forward, and the New York Democrat already endured a political drubbing in March after helping advance a Republican funding bill days before the start of a shutdown he worried would end up empowering Trump.

“If we have to swallow a House-only radical Republican bill, that’s going to be a problem,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

Schumer has to balance the desires of his progressive base with the demands of his more centrist flank. In a floor speech Saturday morning, he praised the Senate-passed funding package as “an example of how the funding process could work if the other side is willing to work in good faith, instead of listening all the time to Donald Trump and Russell Vought and the extreme right.” But he also warned, “the onus is on the Republican Majority … to ensure this process stays bipartisan in the fall.”

And least one member of his caucus said he’s not interested in Democrats playing hardball: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) has vowed, “I’m voting to keep the government open.”

In the meantime, Thune is already mulling how to pass a second tranche of funding bills. That next bundle could include some of the largest, and most contentious, appropriations measures containing money for the Pentagon, as well as dollars for key Democratic priorities like labor, education and health agencies. He is also predicting that the Senate bill will, on the whole, freeze or cut funding compared to current levels — a possibly winning pitch to his own fiscal hawks and those in the House.

Yet even with signs pointing to future conservative strong-arming, Senate Democrats are warily leaning into bipartisan funding negotiations after Republicans burned them last month by passing Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion from public broadcasting and foreign aid.

“We have been demanding bipartisanship, and we’ve been demanding to mark up bills,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a top appropriator. “That’s not to say that Republicans have done everything right, or that we’re not still angry about various things. But when they behave well, I think it’s on us to reward them.”

Though Democrats are worried that any bipartisan agreement will be undermined by the Trump administration clawing back more funding, many are skeptical they could get Republicans to swear off approval of more rescissions packages as a condition of Democratic support.

“I think that is probably a bridge too far for them,” Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said.

Instead, Democrats are discussing how they might net more tangible wins, such as extending soon-to-expire health care subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income Americans and are set to expire at the end of the year. Senate Democrats are going to use the summer recess to preview their messaging strategy, including holding health care events.

Congress’ fiscal conservatives are beginning to hone their strategy for demanding conditions too. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are now pushing to fund the government at current levels for a year and are willing to allow earmarks in the final package as a way to avoid a massive year-end spending package filled with extraneous items they would otherwise oppose. Those earmarks are a priority of the business-friendly Main Street Caucus and its 83 GOP members.

“We’ve been very clear with the speaker: An overwhelming majority of our members want community project funding in this budget,” Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.), the new chair of the Main Street Caucus, said in an interview.

Republicans who are typically reluctant to vote for a funding patch are now making it clear that the vehicle for funding the government — a continuing resolution or a long-term package — doesn’t matter as much as what concessions Republicans can extract.

“I think you better not call it a CR, let’s put it that way,” Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), who warned in March that he wouldn’t support another stopgap, said in a brief interview before leaving town for August recess. “It’s got to have some wins in it for us.”

Mia McCarthy and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report. 

As the Senate prepared to vote last week to confirm Emil Bove to a lifetime seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, one familiar name kept cropping up: Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

It will be seven years this October since senators confirmed Kavanaugh in the culmination of a politically fraught and highly emotional ordeal that tested personal beliefs and partisan loyalties. And while Bove’s confirmation process was nowhere near as explosive, Democrats and Republicans made comparisons to the Kavanaugh affair throughout.

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa accused Democrats of “dust[ing] off the playbook that they devised” for Kavanaugh in order to vilify Bove. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who is next in line to be the top Democrat on the committee in the next Congress, said Trump allies attempted to paper over ethical questions around Bove’s qualifications in the same way they shrugged off a sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh.

“There’s a similarity here,” said Whitehouse. “[It] smells like political maneuver.”

It illustrates how one of the Senate’s most painful moments continues to haunt lawmakers — particularly those who sit on the Judiciary Committee, which has historically operated on a bipartisan basis at the frontlines of helping the legislative body fulfill its obligations to advise and consent.

“Kavanaugh has kinda become a verb,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a senior member of the Judiciary panel whose defense of the Supreme Court nominee in 2018 catapulted him to conservative stardom.

At least three different whistleblowers came forward ahead of Bove’s confirmation vote with allegations against the nominee, who served as President Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney before becoming a senior Justice Department official. Democrats pressed Bove about his role in facilitating the dismissal of federal corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams, and whether he suggested the administration ignore court orders that would undercut the president’s immigration agenda.

In Bove’s case, the allegations were markedly different from those lodged by Christine Blasey Ford against Kavanaugh, who she said sexually assaulted her in high school — an offense Kavanaugh unequivocally denied. But the tactics deployed by Democrats and Republicans in these cases mirror each other.

In the fights over Kavanaugh and Bove, Democrats and Republicans accused each other of acting in bad faith. With Bove, each party leveraged the other’s behavior during the Kavanaugh episode to undermine the opposite side’s credibility.

“I think it was an embarrassment to the Republicans, with Kavanaugh, that someone would come before us and literally tell her story under oath, a very credible presentation,” said the panel’s ranking member Dick Durbin of Illinois, who was a senior member of the panel when it considered Kavanaugh’s nomination. “I think the same thing is true of these whistleblowers.”

Blasey Ford’s allegations were submitted to Democrats long before they came to light, completely upending Kavanaugh’s anticipated glidepath to party-line confirmation. The new information forced the Judiciary Committee to regroup to hear testimony from Blasey Ford and hold another round of questioning for Kavanaugh.

Still, Democrats complained that Republicans, and the Trump administration, cut corners to expedite a final vote on Kavanaugh. Democrats, in Bove’s case, also accused Republicans of acting too hastily to confirm their nominee, including by refusing to hold an additional hearing with at least one of the whistleblowers who went public.

Conversely, Republicans accused Democrats of waiting until the immediate leadup to Bove’s scheduled confirmation vote to highlight potentially damaging claims against him.

“I felt like it was Kavanaugh-esque,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). “[The whistleblowers might have] thought at the eleventh hour, without time to complete due diligence, that maybe they could get through.”

Tillis, who is not running for reelection, had previously announced he would oppose nominees who expressed support for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; Bove was involved in the dismissal of prosecutors who worked on DOJ cases tied to the attack and advised on White House pardons of the rioters. Tillis was seen as a potential “no” vote who might have blocked Bove from being reported favorably out of the Judiciary Committee; he ended up voting “yes.”

“When you call everyone corrupt, nobody’s corrupt; when the Democrats bring forward whistleblowers every other Thursday, coincidentally just before the vote … to confirm somebody that they oppose, people just tend not to pay attention to the whistleblowers,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “The last minute whistleblowers look contrived and are getting old.”

Ultimately, Bove was confirmed last week in a narrow 50-49 vote, over objections from two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Notably, neither of them formally opposed Kavanaugh on the Senate floor, with Collins deciding to support him and Murkowski voting “present.”

As the shadow of the Kavanaugh saga lingered over the Bove proceedings, it’s possible the bad feelings between the two parties from both episodes will continue to worsen: Democrats are already bracing for the possibility that Trump could be in a position to appoint another justice on the Supreme Court if a vacancy occurs, which would set up another monumental political battle.

And while the confirmation of conservative jurists was a key pillar of Trump’s first term, Trump is making clear that, in his second term, loyalty is the driving factor in his selection process, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

Trump is also now pressuring Grassley to abandon the practice of allowing home state senators to effectively veto potential U.S. attorneys or district court judges for their own state, and Senate GOP leadership is considering changing the chamber’s rules in the fall to speed up the process for confirming some nominees. Both would further shake up institutional precedent just as Democrats say the Kavanaugh and Bove cases challenged the status quo.

“I do think that the sense of frustration and even anger has become more pronounced simply because there are so many rules and norms that they are defying and disregarding without even a pretense of fairness,” Blumenthal, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said of the chamber’s judicial confirmation process.

“I think the partisan divide may have deepened somewhat,” he continued. “The issue is the same –that is, the denial of a full and fair investigation of the nominee, whether it was Kavanaugh or Bove.”

As chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing energy and water programs, Sen. John Kennedy is among the rarefied group of “cardinals” — the 12 gavel-holders who tend to take a clubby, I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine approach to the trillion-dollar government funding process they manage each year.

Lately, though, Kennedy has hardly been acting like one of the gang.

The Louisiana Republican has accused the Senate of “playacting” through this year’s bipartisan spending talks — a process, he says, that is actually as “dead as Jimmy Hoffa.” This past week, he contributed to a days-long holdup on an initial package of fiscal 2026 spending bills — insisting he get a chance to vote against funding for Congress itself.

And he’s flirting with a second act this fall, delaying his own bill to fund energy and water programs as he pushes for a spending cut. He’s also drawing red lines that could leave a separate bill funding the Interior Department hanging in limbo.

Kennedy’s assessment that the government funding process is “broken” isn’t playing well with colleagues. That includes Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Appropriations Democrat and a veteran of hard-nosed partisan fiscal negotiations.

“He’s breaking it,” Murray said in a brief interview.

As Kennedy tells it, his colleagues need to accept reality: Washington will be running on short-term spending patches, known as continuing resolutions, for the foreseeable future given the political hurdles to any workable agreement between President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats.

“There hasn’t been a point for a while,” Kennedy said in an interview about the government funding process. Hence, he says, the “playacting.”

It’s bleak talk for someone best known around Capitol Hill for his entertaining if sometimes contradictory approach to lawmaking.

A Rhodes Scholar skilled in dealing out down-home aphorisms to congressional reporters, he’s gaining a new reputation as a persistent headache for GOP leaders when it comes to government spending — and as an odd fit on a panel that is typically home to pragmatic senators who band together to cut deals even if they don’t love every piece.

By no means is he the only member on the committee who has thrown up roadblocks. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, for instance, forced leadership to drop its plan to include a bill funding the departments of Commerce and Justice over Trump’s move to cancel plans for relocating FBI headquarters to his home state of Maryland.

But Van Hollen and others with parochial concerns haven’t questioned the bipartisan appropriations process itself, and even Senate Majority Leader John Thune exhibited surprise at Kennedy’s broadsides.

“We’re just going to do what we can to get the appropriations process moving again, and that’s something we haven’t had here in quite a while,” Thune said. “So there’s a lot of muscle memory we’re trying to engage.””

The Senate is “trying to find a sweet spot,” Thune added.

Kennedy ultimately reached a deal with leadership this week to get a separate vote on funding for Congress. He said he wanted to be able to vote against the Legislative Branch bill without having to oppose a two-bill package focused on the departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture. He’s angling to make a similar protest vote against the bill funding the Department of Interior and environmental projects, which would complicate Thune putting it in a second spending package that he wants to bring to the floor next month.

But Kennedy’s position frustrated colleagues who say he didn’t articulate any policy concern with the congressional funding bill beyond believing it spent too much money. And his willingness to take a verbal sledgehammer to the Senate’s talks is grating on some fellow Republicans who are straining to keep them on track.

“What we’re seeing is different, and I don’t know why,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said about recent tactics from Kennedy and other senators. “When I came on the Appropriations Committee, it was kind of like an unspoken rule, if you will — that we would be there to not only support the Republican bills, but as appropriators, we kind of held together … and we made the process work.”

“We don’t have that right now, which is unfortunate,” she added.

Besides publicly badmouthing the bipartisan process, Kennedy made other moves to rankle his Appropriations colleagues — starting with his vocal support for Trump’s pursuit of “rescissions.”

Those spending clawbacks essentially serve to undo the spending panel’s work. Not only did Kennedy vote for a first $9 billion package last month, he has also been backchanneling with White House budget director Russ Vought about additional requests.

Democrats, and some Republicans, are warning that would blow up the appropriations process, but Kennedy called it “naive” to think if the White House held off that Democrats would want to “share a cup of hot cocoa and a hug with us.”

Meanwhile, his frequent claim that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is responsible for breaking the government funding process has particularly rankled Democrats. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is on the Appropriations Committee and likely to be Schumer’s next No. 2, said the idea that “you’re going to blame the Democratic leader, and you control both chambers and the presidency, is plainly goofy.”

“If he wants to vote no on his own bill, I suppose he’s entitled to do that. It’s a little weird, but he’s entitled to do it,” Schatz said. “But there’s no reason he should block the Senate from considering the legislation that he’s presumably helped to craft.”

That’s a reference to the ongoing standoff Kennedy’s in with Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine over the energy and water bill, which last year directed nearly $60 billion in annual taxpayer spending — much of it on the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Collins and Murray agreed on a topline spending number for the bill Kennedy oversees. But the Louisianan wants to go lower — something Democrats consider to be a breach of the overall bipartisan agreement on the committee.

“Just because Patty gives me a number doesn’t mean I have to accept her number. She’s got one vote, and I’ve got one vote,” he said.

Murray, who is also the top Democrat on Kennedy’s subcommittee, said she is working with Collins on a plan to advance that bill out of committee over Kennedy’s insistence that it include less funding than the panel’s leaders have prescribed.

Kennedy credited Collins with “doing the best she can.” But he said he wants to cut spending and rated the chances of that happening through the bipartisan spending process as about as high as the likelihood that “donkeys may fly someday, too.”

Last Congress, he recalled, panel leaders made the case that Senate appropriators needed to “come together” and “sing ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘We Are the World.” The pitch hasn’t changed this year, he said — he’s just unmoved.

“I love ‘We Are the World,’ it’s a beautiful song,” Kennedy added. “But it’s not reality.’”