Review - HR 4249 Introduced – FY 2026 Legislative Spending

Last month Rep Valadao (R,CA) introduced HR 4249, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2026. The House Appropriations Committee published their Report on the bill. The bill includes one cybersecurity related discussion and two brief mentions about drone spending. The Committee report has an additional discussion about legislative branch cybersecurity.

The FY 2025 version of this bill was HR8772 introduced by Valadao on June 17^th, 2024. That bill was taken up by the House on July 11^th, 2025, and failed by a vote of 205 to 213. There were 10 Republicans (the usual suspects in the 118^th Congress) voting against the bill.

Moving Forward

As we saw with last year’s version of this bill, there is no real requirement for this spending bill (or any of the other remaining ten bills) to pass in the House. A series of continuing resolutions and maybe a year end omnibus bill will keep the government funded, especially this year since the Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves for failure to keep the governmental gelt coming; they do ‘control’ the House, the Senate, and the White House.

For more details about the provisions of this bill, including an expanded spending commentary, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-4249-introduced-fy-2026-legislative - subscription required