Congress returns to debates on government financing and debt limits on Monday

The House and Senate are scheduled to return to Washington on Monday with a busy legislative agenda in the final weeks before the end of the 119th Congress.

Congress will need to act quickly to extend government funding, which expires on December 11. Lawmakers will need to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and they could tackle ambitious proposals including a package of construction permits and a bill to regulate name, image and likeness rules in college sports.

The work will start under a new dynamic. Republicans are returning to the Capitol diminished after suffering substantial losses in the midterms this week. Democrats have achieved an overwhelming majority in the House with at least 255 seats in the chamber’s 435 members and could emerge with as many as 56 seats in the Senate.

With majorities looming in both chambers, Democrats will have little incentive to strike deals with their Republican counterparts.

The most pressing concern lawmakers will face when they return will be government funding. Current funding expires on December 11. Before then, Congress must pass another continuing resolution to maintain current spending levels or a series of appropriations bills for a full year to avoid a government shutdown.

Appropriations bills and continuing resolutions require bipartisan majorities because of the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold. Democrats are unlikely to negotiate a full year of government funding before the new Congress is inaugurated, given that they will soon hold majorities in both chambers and can use it to extract concessions from the White House.

“This former kindergarten teacher will teach President Trump a simple lesson: the power of the purse belongs to CONGRESS!” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., presumptive chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said in an X post Tuesday as election results were coming in. “This is NOT Trump’s money. Taxpayer money belongs to the American PEOPLE.”

The election loss of Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and is one of the “four corners” in spending negotiations, adds another problem to the fundraising campaign. Collins lost his reelection bid to Democrat Troy Jackson, ending a five-term Senate career.

Some lawmakers, including Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., have called on Congress to raise the debt ceiling before Republicans lose control.

In September, the federal debt reached $40 trillion for the first time, colliding with the $41.1 trillion cap enshrined in the Republican Party’s 2025 budget reconciliation law, known as “a big, beautiful bill.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit that tracks the debt limit, said the Treasury will likely reach its maximum borrowing capacity by mid-summer. The United States may no longer be able to meet all of its obligations by November 2027, according to a November 6 Bank of America estimate.

But Democrats may instead prefer to use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip in the next Congress.

Republicans could theoretically raise the debt ceiling as part of a budget reconciliation plan, as they did with their 2025 bill. But it would be difficult to assemble a post-election coalition to approve another reconciliation plan by exceptionally narrow margins. Budget reconciliation, which allows party-line bills to avoid filibusters in the Senate, requires near-total unity.

Congressional leaders, particularly on the Republican side, will likely have difficulty securing lawmakers’ attendance after dozens of members lost their seats in an electoral bloodbath. Leaders will also have difficulty coercing members into compliance, particularly those who have no other elections to run.

Top senators on the energy committees reached agreement on an authorization bill before the election. That deal to ease construction could now be in jeopardy, although the Senate plans to hold a procedural vote to advance it Monday evening, according to a Senate aide familiar with the timeline. The person asked not to be named because the move has not been announced.

The resounding majorities won by Democrats in the House and Senate could prompt them to torpedo the authorization deal in hopes of getting a better one later. The deal may also have been in trouble before the election, with top House Democrats failing to support the version agreed to by their Senate counterparts.

Politico reported Thursday that Democratic minority leader and likely next House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., did not support the authorization deal.

Lawmakers have long sought, without success, a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on authorizing the reforms. Democrats want to accelerate the development of clean energy. Republicans have long complained that the federal permitting process and the environmental laws within it hamper the United States’ ability to build critical infrastructure.

Defense spending

The House passed a version of the NDAA in July, which would authorize more than $1 trillion in defense spending. But Senate Democrats blocked their chamber’s version of the bill that same month over concerns about the war in Iran.

“Donald Trump is dragging America deeper into a war in Iran without authorization, without a plan and without an exit strategy. Democrats will not follow,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement at the time.

The NDAA is generally considered a bipartisan must-pass bill.

The legislation, as it stood in July, also drew pushback from companies because of a provision that would prevent Pentagon contractors from conducting stock buybacks and paying dividends unless they have Defense Department approval.

However, a new problem threatens to derail the NDAA process during the lame duck. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will face a vote on the articles of impeachment when Congress returns, and Democrats have already been highly skeptical of the Pentagon’s demands in this year’s budget as the costly war in Iran drags on.

NIL and stocks

Other priorities could also benefit from speaking time.

The Senate approved a package of measures in September in a bipartisan vote that would establish federal rules for how college athletes are paid. But the legislation faces many opponents in the House, particularly among Democrats, making passage more complicated.

There have also been efforts for years to prohibit members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks.

In previous conventions, these efforts were thwarted by leaders of both parties. And most recently, a bipartisan effort to pass legislation was derailed after House Democrats demanded that the ban also apply to the president.

A Republican-led proposal, called the Stop Insider Trading Act, passed the House with some bipartisan support in July, but faced Democratic opposition because it would only apply to Congress and would not require lawmakers to divest existing holdings.

Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., called for action on the issue in an article on Thursday. Young is a co-sponsor of the Senate version of the Stop Insider Trading Act.

“We have a great opportunity in the lame duck session to restore some confidence by banning members of Congress from trading stocks. I’ve been talking about this for many months, and it should be a no-brainer,” Young said.

Democrats, however, are eager to claim victory over congressional stock trading in the next Congress.

Jeffries, in a letter to fellow House members announcing his candidacy for speaker, listed it as a priority under the Democrats’ anti-corruption agenda.

“We must root out price corruption, clean up the mess at the Supreme Court, and ban members of Congress from trading stocks. The buck stops at home,” Jeffries wrote.