Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins and Ranking Member Patty Murray reached a bipartisan agreement this week to pass a continuing resolution funding the federal government through December 11, well past the October 1 deadline and the November midterm elections. The deal was struck unusually early, before the summer recess ended and before the standard September appropriations scramble began. The speed and the bipartisanship are both worth examining: they are not products of a suddenly functional Congress but of a political environment in which the cost of a shutdown has been recalibrated by experience.
What the 2025 shutdown cost
The recalibration comes directly from the 2025 shutdown, which began October 1, 2025 and ran until November 12, 2025 — the longest government shutdown in modern American history. What distinguished it from earlier episodes was not the immediate economic disruption, which was real but manageable, but the electoral damage. The shutdown ran directly into the midterm cycle’s opening period, when voters were beginning to form the impressions that would carry through to November. Both parties emerged from the experience with data showing that voters assigned blame in ways that did not track party affiliation neatly — a shutdown inflicts visible, personal harm on federal workers, contractors, and national park visitors regardless of who triggered it, and the 2025 episode was long enough that the harm accumulated past the point where any single party could absorb the blame comfortably.
Why both parties moved early
Collins and Murray’s agreement to fund the government through December 11 represents an implicit acknowledgement of this dynamic. December 11 is a lame-duck date — after the November 2026 elections, before the new Congress seats in January. Choosing that date is itself a political calculation: it moves any potential December confrontation into a period when the existing Congress is still in place but the electoral incentives that drive shutdown brinksmanship have been discharged. Whether the December funding debate produces another round of brinksmanship or a clean FY 2027 appropriation depends on the midterm results; the CR does not solve the structural problem, it defers it to a moment of lower political temperature.
The reform question
The agreement lands alongside a separate but related discussion that has begun in Congress about whether the shutdown mechanism itself should be reformed or eliminated. A July 2026 report in Government Executive noted that lawmakers were reconsidering the utility of shutdowns as a budget enforcement tool, with some members pushing for automatic continuing resolutions that would fund the government at existing levels without a congressional vote in the event that appropriations lapsed. The case for this reform is straightforward: the shutdown has not, in its recent iterations, produced any of the fiscal outcomes that its proponents claimed as justification. The FY 2026 shutdown of 43 days produced no significant spending concessions. The mechanism’s function has been rhetorical, not legislative — a demonstration of hardline commitment to a base — and the cost of that demonstration has begun to exceed the political benefit.
The steel-man for the existing mechanism is that automatic CRs remove the only forcing function Congress has for completing appropriations on schedule. If the government keeps running regardless of whether the budget passes, the incentive to reach agreement by October 1 disappears entirely. This argument is technically correct. It is also the argument that has been used to preserve a mechanism that produced the longest shutdown in history and a 43-day episode the previous year, neither of which forced a genuine fiscal resolution. The reform discussion is early and faces strong institutional inertia; it is noted here as a structural signal, not an imminent change.