The headline is who won the election. The tradeoff is the people who just lost, the ones you fired, are still holding the checkbook.
I recorded this week's episode of The Tradeoff on Election Day, before a single result came in, and you may be reading this before the last races are called. In 2022, it took eight days to call the House. So I'm not going to tell you what happened. I'm going to use the past to show you what matters no matter who ends up holding the gavels, because the first test of whoever won doesn't come in January. It comes in December, when government funding runs out.
Where we are
The House and the Senate are supposed to pass 12 regular spending bills a year. That's the appropriations process, and it's what funds the government. Surprise, surprise, Congress hasn't done it. As of this fall, not one of the 12 has become law. The House has passed three. The Senate hasn't finished any.
So the government is running on a continuing resolution, which is simply an extension of the last time Congress did the work, and that funding runs out December 11. The national flood insurance program runs out the same day. So do federal highway programs.
Congress comes back November 9. That's a lame duck session, and the name is exactly what it sounds like. Some of the people deciding how to spend your money no longer have a mandate to do it, because you voted them out of office.
December 2010
To see why this period matters, go back to the lame duck that reset the rules.
Republicans had just won the House, picking up more than 60 seats. Democrats still held the Senate, and President Obama was in the White House. Government funding was going to run out in December, the same setup we have now.
Democrats assumed they'd get to do what the ruling party usually gets to do, which is shove as much spending and as many priorities as possible into one last bill before Congress changed over. They had a $1.1 trillion omnibus ready to go, a full year of funding with billions in earmarks. If it passed, the new majority would walk into January with all of those decisions already made for them.
Senate Republicans, in the minority, held the line. On December 16, Harry Reid pulled the bill. Congress passed a stopgap through March 4 instead, 79 to 16 in the Senate and 193 to 165 in the House, punting the decisions to a Congress where Republicans would control the House.
I was working the coalitions alongside the Hill at the time, and my read, having watched it up close, is that this set the stage for how both parties think about leverage in every spending fight since.
When Republicans took control, they wanted to cut spending, and they used the stopgap to do it. They passed short extensions, a few weeks at a time, with a few billion dollars in cuts attached, small enough for Democrats to sign on. Then came the full-year deal in April. All told, $38 billion in cuts, and a lower base for writing the next budget bill.
That August came the debt limit fight and the Budget Control Act, at least $2.1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. Some of those cuts never came to be. At the time, it was a remarkable result, with no tax increases, for a party that held one chamber of Congress while Democrats held the Senate and the White House.
2018: same setup, parties reversed
Run it again. In 2018, Democrats won the House. Everyone agreed on the 2010 move, and the Senate passed a stopgap into February by voice vote. This was the operating protocol now. You kick the funding over to the next party in power.
But you had a different person in the White House. President Trump said he wouldn't sign anything without money for a border wall. Part of the government closed on December 22 and stayed closed for 35 days, the longest shutdown in American history at that point.
That fight taught me another rule of these short, intense budget battles. The side arguing for the status quo in a shutdown is usually the side that wins, because a shutdown is disruptive in a way that doesn't line up with political parties. If you're a federal worker, a 35-day shutdown means two missed paychecks. If you live in the DC region, that's the difference between feeding your family and not.
He asked for $5.7 billion. Congress gave him $1.375 billion. He then declared a national emergency to move other money to barriers, which is its own story, but on the funding fight itself, the status quo won.
2022: the win that wasn't big enough
Now compare 2022 to 2010. Republicans won back the House again, and the magnitude is the whole story.
In 2010, they picked up more than 60 House seats and six Senate seats. In 2022, they landed at 222 to 213, a net gain of nine, and lost ground in the Senate, where a 50-50 split became 51 to 49 once Georgia's runoff was done. It took until November 16 to call the House.
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy wanted to run the 2010 playbook and wait for January. In a majority that thin, with a vocal part of his party able to derail any negotiation, it was near impossible. Congress finished all 12 bills in the lame duck.
What the numbers say
Here's the part that took me the longest to work through, so I'll give you the clean version.
There have been 15 lame duck sessions since 1994. In two of them, the appropriations work was done before the election. In four, it was finished in the lame duck. That leaves nine where the work carried into the new Congress, in part or in whole.
Of those nine, six came after the political makeup of Congress changed. It isn't only that a new Congress was starting. New parties were running the chambers.
That means 2010 is the rule, not the exception. More often than not, when a midterm changes who's in charge, the spending decisions get made by the new Congress. The midterm exception is 2022.
The tradeoff
If you finish in the lame duck, agencies get a full-year budget. You clear the plate for the new Congress, and nobody plays chicken in January. The cost is that some of the people making the decision were just fired.
If you wait, there's a small-d democratic argument on your side, because the people voters just chose get to make the call. The cost is a stopgap, which makes it very hard to make lasting policy, and a shutdown risk carried into the new year.
Certainty or accountability. In a lame duck, you don't get both.
How to read this week
If Republicans kept both chambers, there's less pressure to do anything big in December. If Democrats took the House but not the Senate, that's 2010 with the parties inverted, and Senate Democrats are sitting where Mitch McConnell sat, in the minority, holding the filibuster to get across the finish line to next year. Either way, watch the leadership elections that follow, because they'll shape how each party handles the year-end work.
Then look past December. In 2010, the leverage Republicans used on the budget carried straight into the debt limit fight the next summer, and we're set up for the same dynamic. The Bipartisan Policy Center expects us to hit the debt limit between late winter and mid-summer of 2027. So who won matters less than what kind of leverage they use in the lame duck, and what standard that sets for the next fight. If Republicans lose both chambers, I'd expect a debt limit increase to be the one thing they most want done before January. If the limit isn't settled in this lame duck, you know exactly where the next fight is.
How it shows up in your house
Everyone's reading a map right now. I want you to look at the calendar.
How much of your work is tied to a federal grant or contract? Do you live somewhere you need federal flood insurance? Do you have a family member who gets a federal paycheck? All of that is on the line before December 11.
For a long time, this stuff has been treated as though it belongs to a select few people in the back rooms of the Capitol. I've sat on those cold marble floors at 11:30 on a Friday night, waiting to see if a funding bill would get done before the clock struck midnight. There's nothing special about me except that I've done it, and now I can tell you how it works.
Even if you are never in the room, you can still think like you were.
Listen to the full episode of The Tradeoff. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1ZpiElTOOQSaXiz6YMzbGx · Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tradeoff-with-mattie-duppler/id1867902434
One thing to do today. Put December 11 on your calendar. Find one thing in your work or your house that runs through that date, and comment on Instagram with what you found. I read every one.