The House was out in October. Does it matter?

WASHINGTON — House Republicans swear they’re not on vacation.

The House has been out since the government shutdown began, and then some. It last conducted legislative business on Sept. 19. But Republicans are doing “some of the most meaningful work of their careers,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at his Monday news conference.

On Tuesday he brought some video receipts: Footage of lawmakers cleaning up parklands, meeting with air traffic controllers or visiting rural hospitals back home in their districts while the current funding lapse ripples through the country.

“This is not what I call a vacation,” Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, told reporters last week.

But whenever Johnson does allow the House to gavel back into session, it will have little to show for the month of October, outside of monotonous daily press conferences at which Democratic and Republican leaders snipe at each other over who’s to blame. In the meantime, work at the Capitol is piling up.

A House member-elect is waiting to be sworn in. A discharge petition aimed at compelling the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files is stuck on the cusp of its decisive 218th signature. Appropriations bills that advanced out of committee earlier this year are collecting dust. And Trump administration officials, officially accountable to Congress, have gotten to bypass House scrutiny altogether.

“It is true that when members are in their district they are working very hard, they are doing things that are an important part of their job,” said Molly Reynolds, interim vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “I think the question is, what’s the right balance between time in Washington and time in the district? And what is the right balance when there is a really significant matter of national concern — a large-scale government shutdown — happening in front of us?”

For Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., the extended recess has thrown a wrench in his plans to push for a proposal he sees as crucial to Congress’ health in the long term — banning members from owning or trading individual stocks. He’s part of a bipartisan group that had hoped to see action on the issue this fall.

Time and momentum is being lost, he said. By comparison, “the Senate has been perfectly capable of taking up other high-priority legislation at the same time that they are also in a budget standoff.”

While the Senate has hardly been a font of productivity during the shutdown — voting over and over again on the same stopgap funding measure — the chamber has remained in session and taken up some other bills and nominations.

“Why the House is not able to ... walk and chew gum at the same time, so to speak, when the Senate has been able to do that, is a mystery,” Magaziner said.

‘Lobbyists love omnibuses’

Even by Congress’ standard, October tends not to be a particularly productive month. Every election year, members flee D.C. to campaign in their districts. The last time the House was in session in October, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted and weeks went by before Johnson was named his successor.

Still, valuable days are being squandered, some observers say.

Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said while it’s difficult to measure just how much productivity has been lost, at the very least the House is not engaged in its typical oversight duties. For one, Attorney General Pamela Bondi was due to testify before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, but that didn’t happen. Bondi still made an appearance before the Senate Judiciary panel on Oct. 7 for a mid-shutdown grilling.

Beyond oversight, keeping the House out of session means that stand-alone bills have less time to move through the process — an increasingly rare occurrence even when there’s not a government shutdown. With an election year right around the corner, the clock is ticking for members to get anything over the finish line.

“An out-of-session House also means that legislation that does get passed this autumn is less likely to move through any process remotely resembling regular order,” Kosar said. Instead, bills will need to be tacked on to larger omnibus measures, like the National Defense Authorization Act, that can be thousands of pages in length.

Those bills are rushed “through the House by leadership, leaving the average legislator, the press, and voters in the dark. This is why lobbyists love omnibuses,” Kosar said.

In addition to the Epstein discharge petition, the swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., and a trio of appropriations bills that were supposed to go to conference committee this month — a push now waiting on the Senate — there are a litany of things the House could be working on at the moment.

Nine of the 12 fiscal 2026 appropriations bills never got a vote on the House floor. Legislation to implement a federal framework around collegiate name, image and likeness deals advanced out of two committees over the summer and then stalled. The National Flood Insurance Program — which serves 4.7 million policyholders — has lapsed, and funding for maintenance backlogs on public lands has run dry. Neither can get back up and running without an act of Congress.

And although Johnson could reconvene the House at any moment and allow committees to continue their work, a range of House hearings and markups have been canceled or postponed.

Even so, House GOP leaders are projecting confidence.

“We have a hard-working team that knows how to use whatever days the House gives us to get our principal objectives (accomplished),” House Financial Services Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., said Oct. 21 on the sidelines of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association annual conference in Washington. His committee postponed seven hearings scheduled for October and two markup days, slated for Oct. 28 and 29, where the panel would have taken up more than a dozen separate pieces of legislation.

Johnson pointed to incremental steps, like the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee releasing additional documents related to its investigation into Epstein. He also touted its probe into President Joe Biden’s use of autopen.

“All these essential functions of the House of Representatives continue in earnest,” Johnson said.

‘Congress always finds a way’

Underlying their time away from the Hill is a feeling that Republicans just don’t have a lot of legislative goals now that they’ve passed the sprawling tax and domestic policy package dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The reconciliation bill was a landmark achievement for Trump. “We don’t need to pass any more bills,” Trump said in televised remarks after its passage. “We got everything in that bill.”

To what degree House leadership has internalized that message from the president is unclear. And Johnson might have a variety of reasons to keep the House out of session during a shutdown.

It could be, as Democrats have repeatedly suggested, a ploy to delay a floor vote on the Epstein files. Or it could be part of a larger strategy in the shutdown standoff. Jamming bipartisan priorities could create an incentive for Democrats to negotiate. And keeping Republicans out of the halls of the Capitol, where nosy reporters prowl, limits the risk of the rank and file getting off message.

Still, cracks have emerged. GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Kevin Kiley of California have been among the most vocal, griping publicly about Johnson’s strategy.

“The House should be in session working. We should be finishing appropriations. Our committees should be working,” Greene posted on X last week. “We should be passing bills that make President Trump’s executive orders permanent. I have no respect for the decision to refuse to work.”

But J.D. Rackey, an associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Structural Democracy Project, said a House not in session is not necessarily a House at rest. A lot of the prepwork and backroom dealing on large, must-pass bills like the NDAA can be done behind the scenes even while the House is out.

And, Rackey noted, the last time Congress passed all its appropriations bills before the start of the fiscal year was back in the 1990s. Delays are common, and so are alterations to the congressional calendar. In the 118th Congress, the House added 11 days in session, he said. In the 117th, it dropped two. A change in House rules, codified in 2023, granted the speaker the power to unilaterally declare district work periods, solidifying more power for House leaders as opposed to the rank and file.

“Having them in session when they had said they were going to be in session is a good thing, and we should want to follow that,” said Rackey.

While he may not like the schedule changes, Rackey is also not particularly stressed about the position the House will find itself in whenever it reconvenes.

“Congress always finds a way to get itself out of the predicaments that it puts itself in,” he said.

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(Mark Schoeff, David Jordan and David Lerman contributed to this report.)