WASHINGTON — The top four House and Senate appropriators met Thursday for the first time since the partial government shutdown but emerged with no breakthroughs that could pave the way for a new spending package.

The meeting marked a small, positive step toward bipartisan negotiations that would be needed for an eventual deal. But so far, the two chambers and the two parties remain on different paths when it comes to fiscal 2026 spending bills.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, favors moving a massive package of up to five bills, featuring the two largest — Defense and Labor-HHS-Education. But there is no sign of any bipartisan agreement on overall spending limits, a major impediment to moving a package that would well exceed $1 trillion and make up the bulk of the year’s discretionary spending.

By contrast, House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., wants to move a smaller batch of bills that could conceivably be enacted before Christmas.

House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said no decisions about the contents of the next package were made during the meeting, though it was discussed. Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., also attended.

While the House Appropriations Committee has reported all 12 of its annual spending bills out of committee, the Senate panel has not yet held markups for its four most difficult bills — Energy-Water, Financial Services, Homeland Security and State-Foreign Operations.

Collins said Wednesday there would “most likely” be markups of those four bills and appropriators are “still trying to work out something.”

“Lots has to happen in the Senate,” DeLauro said. “So we have to wait and see” what will make it into the next package, she said.

The meeting focused on the workload facing appropriators ahead of the new Jan. 30 funding deadline, she said.

“We have a lot of work to do between now and Jan. 30, and everybody understands that and what we are trying to do to get to where we need to go,” DeLauro said. “So yeah, we are all talking.”

DeLauro’s warning

The funding extension that ended the longest partial government shutdown in history last week included three full-year spending laws: Agriculture, Legislative Branch and Military Construction-VA.

While those bills were negotiated among the “four corners,” as appropriations leaders are known, DeLauro had not signed off on the Military Construction-VA law before Republicans released it.

She wanted fiscal 2027 advanced appropriations for the bill’s Toxic Exposures Fund, which is used to implement the 2022 law that expanded health care eligibility for veterans exposed to toxins. That funding was not included in the final bill.

Future bills should not be advanced without sign-off from all parties, she said.

“I remind people that that happened, and should not happen again,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Senate left town for its Thanksgiving recess Thursday without acting on the spending package Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had hoped to get started on this week.

Senate Republicans have been working through objections to adding some combination of the Commerce-Justice-Science, Interior-Environment, Labor-HHS-Education and Transportation-HUD bills to the underlying Defense bill.

Cole has said that any bills not done by the new Jan. 30 deadline should be covered by a full-year continuing resolution, which all appropriators generally want to avoid. DeLauro wasn’t yet ready to address that idea Thursday.

“I’m going to jump off that bridge when I get to it,” she said.

_____

Jacob Fulton and Aris Folley contributed to this report.

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.