Review - HR 5371 Amended and Passed in Senate – FY 2026 CR

Yesterday the Senate finally completed action on HR 5371, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2026. By votes of 60 to 40, the Senate adopted the substitute language from the Senate Appropriations Committee and then passed the amended bill. The revised language would extend the current spending through January 30^th, 2026 and would pass the three spending bills earlier adopted by the Senate when it passed HR 3944, the FY 2026 MilCon spending bill in August. The revised bill gets a new title of the “Continuing Appropriations, Agriculture, Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Extensions Act, 2026”.

Moving Forward

Reportedly, the House will be in session tomorrow (still not on the Majority Leader’s calendar) to vote on this bill, violating a whole bunch of promises not to force members to vote on spending bills without adequate time to review the provisions. It appears that the Democratic leadership in the House is trying to convince members to not vote for this bill while their requested ACA subsidies are still not included. This may be important because there could be a number of Republican holdouts that will not want to vote for this bill because of the bipartisan language (and spending allocations) in the three spending bills. It is possible that this Senate deal will not be acceptable to a majority in the House, depending on how well their conference can  hold the Democrats together in opposition.

BTW: The Senate has left town for their Veterans Day Recess. They are scheduled to return to Washington on Tuesday, November 18^th, 2025.

 

For more information on the provisions of this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-5371-amended-and-passed-in-senate - subscription required.