Washington Bought Itself Another 100 Days. It Didn’t Buy a Fiscal Plan

O n September 2, President Trump signed a continuing resolution, keeping the federal government funded through December 11. The House passed the bill 370 to 48; the Senate passed it 90 to 6. Both parties got what they wanted: no shutdown before the midterms, no hard votes, and a fresh budget deadline conveniently scheduled for right after the elections. That is the trick behind every continuing resolution: Solve the political problem in front of you and leave the fiscal dilemma exactly where you found it.

I have spent 30 years reading balance sheets for a living, first running a hedge fund and then building private credit strategies. If my portfolio manager presented me with this kind of “plan,” rolling the same obligations forward every few months while pretending the underlying math had changed, I would fire them on the spot. Congress calls this practice “governance.”

Here is the part nobody in either party wants to say on cable news: The Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal deficit hit $2 trillion for just the first eleven months of fiscal year 2026, and gross national debt recently crossed $40 trillion for the first time. The CBO put those numbers out this month in its August Monthly Budget Review — not some stale, year-old estimate. Interest payments on that debt rose by 12 percent from a year earlier, faster than Social Security, Medicare, and almost anything else in the budget. All three major credit rating agencies — S&P in 2011, Fitch in 2023, and Moody’s in 2025 — have now stripped the United States of its top-tier credit rating, citing exactly this kind of unaddressed deficit growth. We are now paying more to service old borrowing than we spend on national defense.

The December 11 budget deadline forces one of three choices: Pass twelve real appropriations bills with fresh spending levels, enact another stopgap, or let funding lapse for whatever agencies Congress has not gotten around to appropriating for. Unhappy precedent suggests that lawmakers will choose the second option. Continuing resolutions are the legislative equivalent of paying the minimum on a credit card and telling yourself you will deal with the balance next quarter.

The uncomfortable truth is that even a serious appropriations bill would barely touch the problem. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 capped discretionary spending for two years and, by the estimate of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, saved roughly $1 trillion over a decade. That’s real money. It also expired before fiscal year 2026 began, and Congress has replaced it with . . . nothing. Even when those caps were in force, they only touched discretionary spending — the smaller slice of the pie covering defense, education, and the alphabet soup of federal agencies. Through August, federal spending growth was almost entirely in Social Security (up $78 billion), Medicare (up $73 billion), Medicaid (up $47 billion), and net interest (up $111 billion). Those four line items sit outside the annual appropriations fight entirely.

Notice, too, what riders got attached to a bill that was supposed to be a simple funding patch. The same legislation that punts appropriations to December also delays an administrative rule that would let political appointees pull grants for political reasons, extends trade preferences for sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti another two years, and keeps a handful of expiring authorities alive on autopilot. None of that is inherently wrong, but it tells you something about how Congress operates. When lawmakers do not have to make a real choice, they use the moment to make several small ones and promote the package as bipartisan cooperation.

Washington’s planning horizon currently runs about a hundred days, from one continuing resolution to the next. Momentum in the wrong direction does not correct itself. Every deadline that Congress punts on the budget adds velocity to a debt trajectory that’s already moving too fast. Every year we wait to address entitlements makes the eventual fix more painful for the people those programs were built to protect.

For those members up for reelection in November, there is a real argument for avoiding a shutdown fight seven weeks before voters go to the polls. Nobody benefits from furloughed federal workers, delayed veterans’ benefits, or another round of airport security lines stretching out the door. A shutdown is not a serious fiscal strategy. But punting is not a strategy, either. It is the absence of one, dressed up in a press release about “averting a crisis.”

What would an actual fix look like? Start with reinstating enforceable discretionary caps, not the toothless points of order that Congress settled for once the Fiscal Responsibility Act expired. Pair any tax or benefit extension attached to the December package with a real offset, not a promise to cover the cost later. Put a bipartisan commission on Social Security and Medicare solvency on the table before depleted trust funds force the issue in less than a decade, because our looming debt crisis won’t send a save-the-date.

Ronald Reagan liked to say a government agency is the closest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth. A continuing resolution is the closest thing to eternal life that a bad budget gets. December 11 will arrive, the cameras will roll, and Congress will very likely do exactly what it did earlier this month: buy itself another hundred days or so. But the national debt doesn’t care about our election calendar. It just keeps compounding, waiting patiently for someone in Washington to do the math.