Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) are leveraging the rapidly shortening deadline for Congress to avoid a government shutdown in an effort to force Republicans to restore nearly $1.5 trillion in federal spending cuts approved just weeks ago in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBB).

DeLauro is the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, while Murray is the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Their proposed continuing resolution (CR) is viewed as the “official” offering of Democrats as Congress faces yet another threatened government shutdown.

House Republicans on Friday defeated the DeLauro-Murray CR and then approved their own version, which maintained current spending levels and gives Congress more time to complete action on the 2026 federal budget. The Senate is expected later today to fail to get the required 60 votes to pass either the House GOP CR or the Democrats’ DeLauro-Murray CR. Congress returns Monday, September 22 to continue the budget drama.

Congress must by midnight on September 30 complete action on 12 major appropriation bills to keep the federal government funded and open. That means working out the differences between Senate and House versions of those measures, then getting final approved bills to Trump’s desk for signature. This process is referred to as the “regular order” for appropriations.

Or Congress can pass a CR that allows the government to stay open temporarily at current spending levels while giving House and Senate negotiators more time to complete their work on the dozen big appropriations measures.

The DeLauro-Murray “Continuing Appropriations and Extensions and Other Matters Act 2026” keeps the government open through the end of October, thus allowing negotiators nearly six additional weeks to work on completing the dozen regular appropriations. But the most important words in the title of the Democrats’ CR proposal are the “Other Matters.”

Originally, CRs were only supposed to keep the government functioning at currently approved spending levels. But in the years since passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, Congress has — with increasing frequency — failed to approve the 12 required regular order appropriations. That resulted in using CRs more frequently to gain negotiating time.

But politicians being politicians, the CRs also became convenient vehicles to expand federal spending by inserting new expenditures in the “temporary” bills that grew so big that few senators or representatives bothered to read them. The Consolidated Appropriations Act in 2021, for example, included nearly 6,000 pages, within which were a CR and dozens of additional spending provisions packaged as an “omnibus” measure. Such bills can only be voted up or down; amendments to revise or remove specific provisions are barred.

A CR that only extends deadlines is known informally as a “clean CR,” while one that includes additional spending is considered a “loaded CR.” The DeLauro-Murray CR is definitely loaded, as seen in a Fact Sheet issued by the authors who claim their proposal:

“Addresses the health care crisis that President Trump and Republican lawmakers have single-handedly created by:

• “Reversing Republicans’ devastating Medicaid cuts and attacks on the Affordable Care Act in their Big Ugly Betrayal.
• “Preventing Americans’ health care premiums from skyrocketing by extending the premium tax credits that help over 20 million Americans afford health insurance.

“Addresses President Trump’s illegal pocket rescission and protects any spending agreement from unilateral partisan cuts.

“Provides additional funding to enhance security protections for Members of Congress, executive branch officials, and the judiciary.”

But critics claim there is much more concealed in the DeLauro-Murray CR proposal than their vague political rhetoric reveals. An analysis by Matthew Dickerson, director of Budget Policy for the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), concluded that it “would continue discretionary appropriations through October 31, 2025. However, the DeLauro-Murray CR includes a number of policy provisions unrelated to continuing government funding. These provisions would increase government spending by nearly $1.5 trillion.”

Among much else, according to EPIC, DeLauro-Murray permanently extends former President Joe Biden’s costly COVID pandemic-related tax credits at a cost of more than $383 million, while also creating a new inspector general position for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for $20 million and increases government security budgets by almost $300 million.

But the biggest spending hike included in DeLauro-Murray is the measure’s repeal of more than $1.4 billion in cost-savings from health care reforms included in the OBBB. In a separate analysis published in August, EPIC’s Dickerson said, “Medicaid welfare spending has grown out of control, driven by waste, fraud, and abuse. Improper payments made by the Medicaid program alone have totaled $1.1 trillion over the last decade. The One Big Beautiful Bill makes important improvements to Medicaid to address these problems and deliver better care for truly vulnerable Americans.”

Those improvements included stopping improper payments to undeserving or illegal recipients, requiring eligibility verification of beneficiaries, requiring able-bodied adults to be employed or at least seeking work, and reimbursement reforms to stop state governments, especially California, from improperly shifting costs to federal taxpayers.

Dickerson told The Washington Stand that the DeLauro-Murray CR “would fund the government for just one month, but it would be one of the most expensive laws ever enacted in our nation’s history. That is because it includes $1.5 trillion worth of controversial policies that have nothing to do with funding the government. This proposal, for example, would extend the Biden COVID credits that send billions to big insurance companies [and] are rife with fraud and subsidize abortion. It does not seem like a serious negotiating position.”

House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), may vote as early as Friday on a CR that House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) reportedly described to reporters as “clean a CR as you can ever have.” The House GOP’s proposal would simply give negotiators more time to complete work on the regular appropriations.

In a Fox News interview Thursday, Johnson explained that “we’ve been working hard to get the House back to the regular appropriations order, and we’ve achieved that in the House in a bipartisan fashion. They passed all 12 appropriations bills through the committee, three of them off the floor. The Senate passed three bills.”

Johnson also pointed to “the old videos on Saturday mornings about how a bill becomes a law. If the House and the Senate disagree on an appropriation spending bill, they go to a conference committee to work it out. We voted to do that. All this is working well, but we’re coming up on the end of the fiscal year, September 30, so we need a few more weeks to finish this good work.”