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Which specific spending bills failed to pass in the 2025 shutdown?
Executive Summary
The core factual finding is that the 2025 shutdown was triggered primarily because Congress failed to enact a stopgap continuing resolution and had not completed any of the dozen regular FY2026 appropriations bills; the high-profile short-term funding measure H.R.5371 failed in the Senate and multiple CRs failed to advance, contributing directly to the lapse of funding [1] [2] [3]. Reporting and advisories disagree on the granular list of each appropriations bill left incomplete but consistently identify the House-passed CR and the lack of enacted FY2026 appropriations as central drivers of the shutdown [4] [5] [6].
1. Why the shutdown happened — the missing stopgap that mattered
Congress entered October 2025 without having enacted any of the dozen annual appropriations measures required for FY2026, and lawmakers failed to pass a stopgap continuing resolution to bridge the gap. Multiple sources emphasize that no full-year FY2026 appropriations were enacted and that the chamber-level impasse over short-term funding precipitated the shutdown [2] [5]. The House passed a Republican-sponsored continuing resolution intended to fund government through November 21, but the Senate rejected that measure as well as a Democratic CR, leaving agencies without congressional authorization to continue regular operations. Advisories and reporting frame the failure to obtain Senate cloture on H.R.5371 and other CR motions as the proximate legislative cause of the lapse [1] [4].
2. The headline bill that failed in the Senate — H.R.5371
A focal, documentable failure was H.R.5371, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2026. The House passed H.R.5371 on September 19, 2025, but the Senate did not invoke cloture and the measure failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance, with at least one formal Senate vote recorded as unsuccessful on September 30, 2025. This single bill included stopgap appropriations and extensions of expiring programs; its defeat is repeatedly cited as a key event that directly produced the shutdown [1] [5]. The Senate's rejection reflects the broader partisan disagreement over policy riders and whether to attach health-subsidy and Medicaid changes to funding legislation [4] [5].
3. Continuing resolutions and procedural breakdowns — multiple failed attempts
Beyond H.R.5371, reporting documents multiple failed efforts to pass continuing resolutions. Senators voted on at least two different CRs (including H.R.5371 and an alternative S.2882 in subsequent procedural votes), and a series of cloture and procedural motions did not reach the supermajority threshold required in the Senate. Coverage notes 13 failed procedural advances on a House-passed CR before the vote tally that ended the pre-shutdown negotiations, underlining a sustained inability to find 60-vote compromises on the floor [3] [7]. These failures were driven by both policy disputes — notably over health insurance subsidy extensions — and by strategic legislative tactics that required broad consent to alter the House bill’s end date [3] [4].
4. Which full-year appropriations were left undone — an incomplete but consistent picture
The sources do not present a single, exhaustive checklist of each appropriations bill that definitively “failed” in isolation; rather, they converge on the fact that none of the twelve FY2026 bills were enacted by the October 1 deadline. Committee-level actions and some House or Senate committee-approved versions existed for bills such as Defense, Agriculture, Energy-Water, and Labor-HHS-Education, but those measures had not been reconciled into final enacted laws before the lapse [6] [5]. Analysts and watchdog trackers compiled status tables showing bills at various stages, but the shared bottom line across reporting is that the absence of enacted FY2026 appropriations—rather than a small list of individually rejected full-year bills—produced the shutdown [6] [2].
5. Competing narratives and political leverage — what each side said it wanted
Democrats insisted that any short-term funding include extensions of expiring health insurance tax credits and reversals of Medicaid cuts, arguing these were necessary to protect coverage and low-income families; Republicans pressed for a “clean” CR or separate negotiations on those policy items, framing them as unrelated to basic funding. This policy standoff is explicitly cited as the reason Senate Democrats blocked the House-passed short-term bill and as the motivation behind multiple failed cloture votes [4] [5]. The competing frames show policy riders vs. clean funding as the central political tug-of-war that repeatedly prevented the 60-vote Senate threshold for advancing the House CR.
6. What the record does and does not show — clear failures, ambiguous lists
The documentary record clearly shows the failure to pass H.R.5371 in the Senate and confirms that multiple continuing resolutions and procedural efforts failed to achieve cloture; sources uniformly state that zero full-year FY2026 appropriations were enacted ahead of October 1, 2025 [1] [2] [5]. What remains less crisply catalogued across these materials is a single, definitive inventory of every individual appropriations bill that “failed to pass” in isolation, because many bills were in committee, some had passed one chamber, and the shutdown's formal legal trigger was the lapse of CR authority rather than the Senate floor defeat of a specific set of line-item full-year bills [6] [8].