The annual appropriations process was built to run as twelve separate bills. Under the framework set by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, effective for fiscal 1977, each of the twelve bills was to be enacted on its own before the fiscal year opened on October 1, so that each part of the federal government received its funding through a measure that had been reported, debated, and passed as a distinct piece of legislation. The record of that design is a record of rare completion. The Congressional Research Service counts only four years since fiscal 1977 in which all of the regular appropriations acts were enacted by the start of the fiscal year: fiscal 1977, fiscal 1989, fiscal 1995, and fiscal 1997. In every other year, some or all of the twelve bills missed the deadline, and the work of funding the government fell to substitute vehicles that combined unfinished business into a single enactment.

The omnibus bill is that standing substitute. An omnibus appropriations act joins most or all of the remaining annual bills into one measure, often with other matter attached, and presents the combined result for a single vote in each chamber and a single signature from the president. Where separate bills would have allowed separate judgments, the package allows one judgment only, taken on the whole. The practice reshaped more than the calendar. Because a spending bill must pass if the government is to keep operating, provisions that might not have passed as freestanding legislation could be carried on a funding measure and renewed there year after year, held in place by the need to enact the bill that carried them. The article’s central claim can be stated in a short thesis sentence: Policy by annual rider. Much of the durable policy found in modern appropriations law arrived not through permanent statutes debated on their own terms, but through provisions attached to annual funding acts, where they were renewed as part of the package rather than reconsidered as independent measures.

This article works through that record in sequence. It begins with the reasons the package exists and with the vocabulary of packaging, the terms that separate an omnibus from a consolidated act, a minibus, and a continuing resolution, since the labels mark real differences in scale and function. It then traces the package era through its main anchors, from the full-year continuing resolution that closed fiscal 1988 to the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, which carried all twelve bills and was signed on March 15, 2022. The account turns next to the rules that were supposed to keep legislation off appropriations bills, House Rule XXI and Senate Rule XVI, and to the waivers and silences that let legislative provisions through despite them. A rider ledger follows, cataloguing the long-running provisions treated in the article, each with its subject, its first year, and the article in this series that covers its substance. The article then examines the leverage a package creates for the leaders who assemble it and for a president who must accept or reject it whole, weighs the counter-reading that packaging is simply how a divided government finishes necessary work, and sets out the costs in amendment opportunities, review time, and the written record. It closes with the return of earmarks for fiscal 2022, after a moratorium that ran from 2011, as Community Project Funding in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022. The sections that follow begin with the reasons the package exists at all, in Why the Package Exists.

Why the Package Exists

An omnibus bill is what the appropriations process produces when it runs out of calendar. The ordinary path for spending legislation is well defined: twelve annual appropriations bills, one for each pair of appropriations subcommittees in the House and Senate, move through hearings, markups, floor debate, and conference, and are presented to the president one by one, in the sequence described in this series’ account of how a bill becomes law in practice. Each bill funds a defined slice of the government for one fiscal year. When all twelve complete that path before the fiscal year opens, the government is funded by regular order. The record of the past four and a half decades is that this almost never happens, and the omnibus is the instrument the institution built for the ordinary case, in which some or most of the twelve are unfinished when the deadline arrives and the unfinished work must be gathered into a vehicle that can carry it all at once.

The cause is arithmetic before it is politics. Twelve bills generate twelve separate opportunities for delay in each chamber, twelve conferences or their equivalents, and twelve presentments, and the delay in any one of them cannot be recovered by speed in the others, because the bills move on different calendars through different subcommittees with different disputes. A single contested provision, a border funding figure, an abortion limitation, a dispute over a weapons program, can hold one bill for months while the other eleven proceed. The unfinished bills then accumulate at the end of the session in a pile whose members share one property: none of them can become law alone in the time remaining, because each carries its own unresolved disagreement, and the disagreements are the reason the bills are unfinished. Packaging does not dissolve those disagreements. It changes the forum in which they are settled, moving them from twelve subcommittee and floor processes into a single negotiation, and it changes the question put to each chamber, from whether a member supports a particular bill to whether a member supports the whole settlement or prefers the funding lapse that follows its defeat.

The Deadline That Almost Never Holds

The deadline is statutory in origin. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 rebuilt the federal budget calendar around a fiscal year that begins on October 1, and the framework took effect with fiscal year 1977. From that year forward, a complete performance of regular order meant twelve enacted appropriations acts, or the consolidated measures standing in their place, signed before October 1. The Congressional Research Service has counted the occasions on which the standard was met. In the span from fiscal year 1977 forward, all of the regular appropriations acts were enacted by the start of the fiscal year in only four instances: fiscal year 1977 itself, the first year under the new calendar; fiscal year 1989; fiscal year 1995; and fiscal year 1997. Four completions in more than four decades is not a record of occasional failure. It is a record in which failure to complete the twelve bills on time is the normal condition of the process, and any account of the omnibus that treats it as a departure from a working norm has the history backwards. The package is the norm’s working substitute.

Three pressures make the deadline so hard to hold, and each pressure operates independently of the others. The first is sheer volume: the twelve bills together carry the entire discretionary budget, thousands of accounts and provisions, and the subcommittees that draft them work through agency budget justifications that arrive in the winter for a product due in the summer. The second is the points system of the budget process itself, under which the twelve bills must divide a single discretionary total, allocated first to the appropriations committees and then among their subcommittees; a dispute about the total, or about the division, delays every bill beneath it, and in years when the budget resolution itself is late or never adopted, the appropriations committees work for months without an agreed ceiling. The third pressure is controversy concentration. The annual bills are the only legislation that must pass in a given year, and measures that must pass attract provisions that cannot pass on their own. Members and committees seek to attach contested policy to the spending bills precisely because the spending bills cannot be allowed to fail, and each attachment makes the host bill harder to finish. The omnibus is where all three pressures discharge. When the bills stall, the leadership of the two chambers and the two appropriations committees negotiates the unfinished set as one text, the attached provisions are bargained in the same room as the funding levels, and the chambers are asked to approve the result as a single act.

The alternative to the package, it should be said plainly, is not the twelve bills passed late one by one. The record shows what the alternatives are. One is the continuing resolution, defined below, which extends prior-year funding for a period and defers every unfinished decision. The other is a lapse in appropriations, a shutdown, which the Antideficiency Act makes unavoidable when funding expires for an agency, since the statute bars officials from spending or obligating money that has not been appropriated. Between those two outcomes and the omnibus, Congress has usually chosen the omnibus for the bulk of the work, finishing most cycles in a consolidated act, reaching for continuing resolutions at the margins, and enduring shutdowns only when the negotiation itself collapses. The package exists because the deadline is real, because the work is too large and too contested to finish twelve times in most years, and because a legislature that cannot complete its parts can sometimes still complete the whole.

Four Words for Packaged Money

The vocabulary of packaged appropriations is used loosely in public discussion, and the looseness hides distinctions that matter. Four terms cover the field: omnibus, consolidated, minibus, and continuing resolution. Each names a different relationship between the vehicle and the twelve regular bills.

Omnibus and Consolidated: One Practice, Two Labels

An omnibus appropriations bill is a single measure that combines most or all of the regular appropriations bills that remain unfinished, together with any other matter its negotiators choose to load into it, and carries the combination through both chambers as one text for one presidential signature. The word is descriptive rather than formal. It names the practice, a bus carrying many passengers, and it has been applied to the great year-end packages since the early nineteen eighties.

The formal title that the same practice usually wears is consolidated appropriations act. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 are omnibus bills in every functional sense: each gathered the unfinished regular bills into a single enactment. The difference between the two labels is a difference of register, not of kind. “Omnibus” is the term of analysis and of criticism, used by scholars, journalists, and opponents of a given package. “Consolidated” is the term of the statute book, the word the drafters place in the title of the act itself. A reader who understands that the two words name one practice can move between the Congressional Research Service’s accounts of omnibus legislating and the titles printed in the Statutes at Large without being misled into hunting for a legal distinction that does not exist. Within the act, the constituent bills survive as divisions and titles, each division corresponding to one of the regular appropriations bills, drafted in the main by the subcommittee that owns it, so that the structure of the twelve-bill process remains visible inside the single enactment like the frame of a building inside its finished walls.

The Minibus: A Partial Package

A minibus is a package of some of the regular bills, fewer than the full set, combined into one measure while the remaining bills proceed separately or wait. The coinage is a Washington joke that became a term of art, mini joined to omnibus, and it names a real procedural strategy: when a subset of the twelve bills is ready and its members can agree, those bills are packaged together and moved, banking completed work before the end-of-session negotiation over the contested remainder begins.

The fiscal year 2019 cycle is the clearest modern demonstration. Five of the twelve bills were enacted before October 1, 2018, carried in two minibuses, one joining the energy and water, legislative branch, and military construction bills (P.L. 115-244), and one joining the defense and labor, health and human services, and education bills (P.L. 115-245). The on-time portion of that cycle was itself completed by packaging, in two combined measures rather than in five separate enactments. The fiscal year 2012 cycle used the same device later in the calendar, enacting three bills in a minibus (P.L. 112-55) in November 2011 and the remaining nine in a consolidated act the following month. The minibus matters to the taxonomy because it shows that packaging is a spectrum rather than a single event. At one end stand twelve separate bills, at the other a single act for everything, and the working process moves along the spectrum during each cycle, packaging what can be packaged when it can be packaged, and holding the residue for the final negotiation.

The Continuing Resolution: A Bridge, Not a Building

A continuing resolution is a different instrument from any of the packages above, and confusing it with an omnibus is the most common error in accounts of the process. A continuing resolution does not enact the year’s appropriations. It continues the prior year’s, providing authority for agencies to spend at a rate based on the previous year’s levels, under the previous year’s terms and conditions, for a stated period that ends on a date or on the enactment of the regular bill, whichever comes first. Its text is short, its formula is mechanical, and its purpose is to prevent a funding lapse while the real bills are finished. The fiscal year 2022 cycle ran through four continuing resolutions, extending funding first to December 3, then to February 18, then to March 11, and finally to March 15, before the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 was enacted on the last of those dates.

Two features of the instrument deserve precise statement. The first is the anomaly. A continuing resolution written on the pure formula would freeze every account at the prior year’s rate, and some accounts cannot run on that formula: a program whose authorizing schedule requires a payment the prior year’s rate cannot cover, a decennial census in its peak year, a benefit whose caseload has moved. Drafters therefore write anomalies into continuing resolutions, specific exceptions that adjust a rate, extend an expiring authority, or permit a new start for a named account. Each anomaly is a small piece of fresh legislating inside the stopgap, and a long continuing resolution accumulates them. The second feature is duration. A continuing resolution can run for the whole fiscal year. The fiscal year 1988 cycle, examined in the history that follows, was funded in full by a single continuing resolution (P.L. 100-202), and the fiscal years 2007 and 2011 were closed the same way for most of the government. A full-year continuing resolution is the limiting case of the stopgap: the bridge is never replaced by a building, the prior year’s choices govern a year they were never made for, and no new priorities are funded because the formula contains no one’s new priorities. Against that outcome, the omnibus, for all the procedural costs catalogued later in this article, at least contains the current year’s decisions. The vocabulary thus resolves into a single axis. Omnibus and consolidated name a new enactment of the whole workload; minibus names a new enactment of part of it; continuing resolution names the deferral of enactment, temporary in design and, in the limiting case, permanent in effect.

A Short History of the Package Era

The package era developed as a practical response to a calendar that Congress met in full only rarely. Under the framework of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, effective for fiscal 1977, the fiscal year began on October 1, and the regular appropriations acts were expected to be enacted by that date. The Congressional Research Service record showed how seldom that expectation was met for the full set of bills. In only four years after fiscal 1977, fiscal 1977, fiscal 1989, fiscal 1995, and fiscal 1997, were all of the regular appropriations acts enacted by the start of the fiscal year. In other years, unfinished bills had to be carried forward in another form.

That form took several related shapes. A continuing resolution was a stopgap that extended prior year funding rates and conditions for a period, which could run for days or for a full year. An omnibus act combined most or all of the remaining annual appropriations bills, and often other matter as well, into one act. A consolidated appropriations act carried the same practice under the formal title that most later packages used. A minibus applied the same idea at a smaller scale, packaging a few bills together. The names differed, but the move was the same. Separate bills that had not completed the process on their own were joined together, negotiated as a single measure, and presented to each chamber and to the president as one decision. Some years ended in a full year continuing resolution. Other years ended in one large consolidated act. Still other years split the work between a minibus and a consolidated act, or between two packages. Enactment dates fell in December, January, February, and March for fiscal years that had begun the previous October, and presidents signed measures that combined bills they might have treated differently if the bills had arrived separately, because a package left only one signature decision for the whole set.

The Full-Year Resolution of the Late Nineteen Eighties

The fiscal 1988 episode set an early marker because it showed how far a stopgap could stretch. Fiscal 1988 began on October 1, 1987. The regular appropriations process did not produce a complete set of enacted bills for the year, and the year was finished through a continuing resolution. In December 1987, that resolution became law as P.L. 100-202. Its defining feature was its duration. A short continuing resolution preserved the status quo at prior year rates and under prior year conditions while the regular bills remained under negotiation, subject to exceptions, known as anomalies, that could change a rate or a condition where a straight extension would not work. The fiscal 1988 resolution did more than buy time. It ran for the full year, so no regular bills followed to replace it. Funding continued and the government operated, but the cover came from an extension measure rather than from the set of individual appropriations acts that the calendar contemplated.

The contrast with the year that followed was instructive. Fiscal 1989 was one of the four years after fiscal 1977 in which all of the regular appropriations acts were enacted by October 1. In one year, the process relied on a full year extension. In the next, the same process, under the same calendar, completed its work on time. Packaging and full year extensions were therefore not the product of a calendar that made timely completion impossible. They were the product of years in which timely completion did not happen, and in which funding law still had to be placed in effect for the remainder of the year.

For the decades that followed, P.L. 100-202 stood as the template for one recurring outcome. When a cycle dragged on without agreement on the regular bills, a full year continuing resolution remained available as the fallback that funded the government without enacting the regular set, and later Congresses returned to that fallback in the two thousands and again at the start of the twenty tens. The fiscal 1988 case also demonstrated the naming problem that ran through the whole era. A measure called a resolution, and described as continuing, could in substance be the appropriations law of the United States for an entire fiscal year.

What does an anomaly do inside a continuing resolution?

An anomaly is an exception written into a continuing resolution where a straight extension would not work. Most of the measure preserves prior year rates and conditions, but an anomaly changes a particular rate or condition for the period covered, adjusting the extension instead of leaving every term frozen in place.

The Late Nineteen Nineties: Omnibus by Name

By the late nineteen nineties, the package had acquired its best known name. The fiscal 1999 measure was titled the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, and it became law on October 21, 1998, as P.L. 105-277, three weeks after fiscal 1999 had begun. The title recorded the combination at work. Omnibus signaled that most or all of the remaining annual bills had been joined in one act. Consolidated carried the same meaning in formal appropriations language. Emergency supplemental signaled that the act carried matter beyond the regular annual bills as well, which matched the definition of an omnibus as a vehicle that often included other matter alongside the bills it combined. The fiscal 1999 act was not a continuing resolution and it was not a single regular bill. It was a package, named as a package, enacted as a package, and signed as a package. Its timing also fit the wider pattern. Fiscal 1995 and fiscal 1997, both in the same decade, were among the four years in which all regular acts were enacted by October 1. Fiscal 1999 was not such a year, and the remaining bills were joined and enacted together after the fiscal year had started.

The fiscal 2000 cycle added a drafting technique that became part of the package record. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal 2000 became law on November 29, 1999, as P.L. 106-113, close to two months after the fiscal year had begun. Rather than printing every remaining measure in full within the act itself, the act incorporated the remaining measures by reference to texts printed in the Congressional Record. Incorporation by reference allowed the enacted law to point to a text located elsewhere in the official record and to give that text legal effect as part of the act. The technique suited the practical problem that packaging created. A measure that combined several bills was long and assembled late, and reference to a printed record text offered a way to fix the content of the law without setting out every page again inside the enacting measure.

The late nineteen nineties packages also belonged to a broader change in how appropriations measures were assembled and explained. In the older sequence, a bill passed by each chamber in different forms went to a conference committee, whose negotiations produced a conference report that both chambers then approved. Readers who wanted to follow that older sequence in detail could turn to conference committees explained for the steps that packaging began to displace. As packages grew, formal conferences fell away. The figures carried in the series record counted 38 formal conferences in the 106th Congress and 9 in the 110th Congress. In place of conference reports, the record of a package consisted in large part of explanatory statements printed in the Congressional Record, which the Congressional Research Service described as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act. The Government Accountability Office Red Book treated explanatory statement language as non binding unless it was incorporated by reference into the act itself. The fiscal 2000 act, which incorporated measures by reference, sat at the meeting point of those two practices. Reference could give a record text the force of law, and statements that were not incorporated remained explanation rather than law.

Taken together, the fiscal 1999 and fiscal 2000 acts fixed the vocabulary and the methods of the package era. One act put omnibus in the title and combined the remaining bills with emergency supplemental matter. The next used the consolidated title and incorporated its remaining measures by reference. Both finished after October 1, and both replaced a set of separate enactments with a single enactment.

The Two Thousands: Resolutions That Last a Year

The two thousands opened with a consolidated act that carried a lasting rider and later produced two cycles that ended, as fiscal 1988 had ended, in full year continuing resolutions. The fiscal 2003 measure was titled the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, and it became law on February 20, 2003, as P.L. 108-7, more than four months after fiscal 2003 had begun. The resolution carried most of the remaining appropriations bills for the year. It also carried the first form of a recurring provision on law enforcement data publication, known as the Tiahrt language, which barred the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from disclosing firearms trace data in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The provision was broadened in the fiscal 2004 cycle, and the Congressional Research Service tracked it thereafter as a recurring rider. Its first appearance inside the fiscal 2003 consolidated resolution illustrated a feature of packages that the later history repeated. A large vehicle that had to pass could carry policy language, worded as a limit on the use of funds, that might have faced a harder path as a freestanding bill.

The choice of the word resolution in the fiscal 2003 title illustrated the looseness of package naming. The fiscal 1988 full year measure had been a continuing resolution. The fiscal 2003 measure was a consolidated appropriations resolution, but it was not a stopgap extension of prior year rates. It was the substantive funding law for most of the remaining bills, enacted in February, well into the fiscal year. The substance of each act, the bills it carried and the riders it contained, determined what the act did, and the titles used overlapping words for different kinds of measures across the era.

Fiscal 2007 returned to the older fallback. That cycle finished in a full year continuing resolution, which became law as P.L. 110-5. As in fiscal 1988, the extension measure covered the year, and the regular bills that had not been enacted were set aside rather than completed. The outcome came two decades after the fiscal 1988 outcome and produced the same institutional result. When the regular process did not finish, the continuing resolution, written to last the full year and carrying whatever anomalies the cycle required, finished the year instead.

Fiscal 2011 repeated the outcome at the turn of the decade, ending in a full year continuing appropriations act, P.L. 112-10. Between the fiscal 2007 and fiscal 2011 outcomes, a pattern was visible. In the space of five fiscal years, two cycles had ended without the regular set of bills and with a year long extension in their place. Neither outcome changed the October 1 start of the fiscal year or the formal expectation that regular bills would be enacted by that date. The expectation and the outcomes coexisted, and the gap between them was the space in which packaging operated.

The Twenty Tens: Minibuses, Cromnibus, and the Thirty-Five Day Shutdown

The twenty tens produced the richest vocabulary of the package era and some of its largest measures. Fiscal 2012 moved to a split finish that introduced the minibus as a named form. The year was completed through two measures. The first was a minibus, P.L. 112-55, which packaged three bills together. The second was a consolidated act, P.L. 112-74, which carried the remaining bills. The minibus term, formed by combining mini with omnibus, described the scale of the vehicle. It was smaller than a full omnibus, it grouped only a few bills, and it left the rest of the year to be finished by a larger measure. The fiscal 2012 cycle showed that packaging could be staged. A subset of bills could move together first, and the remainder could follow in a consolidated act, rather than every bill waiting for a single vehicle at the end of the cycle.

Fiscal 2014 returned to the single consolidated form and completed the full set. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal 2014 became law on January 17, 2014, as P.L. 113-76, and it carried all twelve regular appropriations bills. Enactment in the middle of January meant that the first quarter of the fiscal year had passed before the regular bills became law in combined form. The act nevertheless represented the most complete version of the consolidated model. Every bill was inside one act, the act was a substantive funding law rather than an extension, and the year was finished in a single signature.

Fiscal 2015 produced the hybrid that gave the decade its most quoted nickname. The measure that became law on December 16, 2014, as P.L. 113-235, was known as the cromnibus, a name that joined continuing resolution with omnibus to describe what the act did. By the count of the Los Angeles Times, the act ran to 1,603 pages. Inside it, eleven of the twelve regular bills were carried as a consolidated appropriations package. The twelfth bill, for the Department of Homeland Security, was not carried on the same terms. Homeland Security funding was instead carried by a continuing resolution within the same enactment, which left that department on prior year rates and conditions while the other eleven bills received their regular appropriations. The hybrid structure recorded a disagreement that the package could not settle. Rather than hold all twelve bills for the disputed one, the act split the treatment inside a single law. Eleven bills moved forward as regular appropriations, and one department moved forward as an extension.

Fiscal 2016 followed with a return to the complete consolidated form. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal 2016, P.L. 114-113, carried all twelve bills, as the fiscal 2014 act had done. The alternation between fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2016 showed that the hybrid and the complete forms were both available tools, chosen cycle by cycle. A cycle with one unsettled bill could produce a cromnibus. A cycle in which all twelve bills could be agreed could produce a full consolidated act.

Fiscal 2018 produced the largest package of the decade up to that point and the clearest recorded statement of the presidential side of package politics. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal 2018, P.L. 115-141, ran to 2,232 pages. The House passed the measure, and the president signed it on March 23, 2018, a day after House passage. At the signing, the president said publicly that he would never sign another bill like it. The statement and the signature belonged together in the record. A package presented the president with one decision for the whole set of bills combined in the act. There was no partial veto by which a president could approve parts of a package and reject the rest, the Line Item Veto Act having been struck down by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York (1998). A president who objected to parts of a 2,232 page act could veto the entire act, with the funding consequences that a veto late in a cycle carried, or sign the entire act and state objections for the record. In March 2018, the president signed and stated the objection in public terms, and the act became law in full.

Fiscal 2019 closed the decade with the opposite staging from fiscal 2015 and with a long shutdown. For fiscal 2019, five appropriations bills were enacted before October 1, 2018, in two minibuses, P.L. 115-244 and P.L. 115-245. That early progress left seven bills unfinished when the fiscal year began. The remaining seven were finished only after a shutdown of 35 days, the lapse in appropriations that followed when funding for the unfinished bills expired and no agreement replaced it in time. The shutdown rested on the rule of the Antideficiency Act, which barred spending without appropriations. The remaining bills were finished in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019, P.L. 116-6. The fiscal 2019 cycle therefore contained, in one year, an on time partial finish through minibuses, a long lapse, and a late consolidated finish for the majority of the bills.

Fiscal 2020 ended in two packages rather than one. On December 20, 2019, two measures became law, P.L. 116-93 and P.L. 116-94, dividing the regular bills between them. Across the twenty tens, every combination in the vocabulary had been used: minibuses in fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2019, a cromnibus in fiscal 2015, complete consolidated acts in fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2016, and two packages in fiscal 2020. Packaging was not one procedure. It was a family of procedures for finishing a year that the regular calendar had not finished.

The Longest Bill: The Fiscal Twenty Twenty-One Act

The fiscal 2021 cycle produced the measure that closed the historical sequence and set the size record for the era. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, P.L. 116-260, ran to 5,593 pages per the Senate Historical Office, which identified it as the longest bill ever passed by Congress. The comparison with the earlier page counts in the record showed the scale of the increase. The fiscal 2015 cromnibus had run to 1,603 pages by the Los Angeles Times count. The fiscal 2018 consolidated act had run to 2,232 pages. The fiscal 2021 act, at 5,593 pages, was more than twice the length of the fiscal 2018 act and more than three times the length of the fiscal 2015 act. Page counts from different counters were not exact measures of substance, since formatting and printing choices affected any count, but the Senate Historical Office identification of the fiscal 2021 act as the longest bill Congress had passed gave the figure an institutional standing beyond a newspaper count.

The length of the fiscal 2021 act reflected its contents. The act combined all twelve regular appropriations bills in one measure. It also combined those bills with pandemic relief, so that the annual funding law for the government and a large body of relief law traveled in the same vehicle and were enacted by the same votes. That combination followed the definition of an omnibus with which the era had begun. An omnibus combined most or all of the remaining appropriations bills and often other matter. In fiscal 1999, the other matter had included emergency supplemental appropriations. In fiscal 2021, the other matter was pandemic relief, and its inclusion helped account for a bill of 5,593 pages that both chambers had to consider as one measure.

The timing of the fiscal 2021 act matched the late pattern of the era. Both chambers passed the measure on December 21, 2020, close to three months after fiscal 2021 had begun on October 1, and the president signed it on December 27, 2020. Passage by both chambers on the same day left no room for the older sequence of separate chamber consideration followed by a conference to reconcile different texts. The package arrived as a finished negotiation, and each chamber approved the same text on the same day. The six days between passage and signature placed the final decision, like the decision in March 2018, in the hands of a president facing one act that contained the full year of appropriations and the relief matter combined with them.

As the closing case in the history, the fiscal 2021 act gathered the threads that ran from fiscal 1988 forward: a full year resolution, an omnibus named as such in 1998, incorporation by reference in 1999, a consolidated resolution carrying a new rider in 2003, full year resolutions again in 2007 and 2011, and minibuses, a cromnibus, complete consolidated acts, a presidential pledge at a signing, a 35 day shutdown, and a two package finish across the twenty tens. The fiscal 2021 act exceeded each earlier measure in length and joined the two kinds of law, annual appropriations and major relief legislation, that a must pass vehicle could carry.

The Rules That Say No

Both chambers maintain a rule against legislating on an appropriations bill. The idea behind each rule is a division of labor within lawmaking itself. An appropriations bill supplies money for the operations of the government. A provision that changes existing law does different work: it alters the legal rules under which agencies, programs, and private parties operate. House Rule XXI and Senate Rule XVI each draw a line between those two functions, and each line is enforced, in the first instance, from within the chamber that wrote it. A member who believes that a provision has crossed the line raises a point of order, and the presiding officer rules on the objection under the chamber’s precedents. If the point of order is sustained, the offending provision, or in the Senate in one setting the bill itself, faces the consequence the rule prescribes.

Neither rule operates on its own. A point of order is an objection, and an objection that no member raises has no effect on the text under consideration. Both chambers also possess regular, orderly methods for setting their own rules aside for a particular bill, and those methods are part of the rules themselves rather than violations of them. The result is a system in which the prohibition is real, the exceptions are defined, and the decision to enforce or to waive the prohibition rests with the chamber in each instance. The sections that follow take the elements in order: the House rule by its terms, the Senate rule by its terms, the waiver practice that sets both rules aside, and the drafting form, the limitation, that the House rule expressly leaves in order and that has therefore proved the most durable kind of rider.

House Rule Twenty-One: No Law in a Money Bill

House Rule XXI, clause 2, contains two distinct prohibitions. Clause 2(a) addresses the money itself. It bars an appropriation in a general appropriation bill for an expenditure not previously authorized by law. The sequence in that sentence carries the substance. Authorization comes first, by law, and the appropriation follows. A general appropriation bill is a vehicle for funding decisions within authority that the law has already created, and clause 2(a) keeps the bill from serving as the source of the underlying authority at the same time. Where no prior law authorizes an expenditure, an appropriation for that expenditure in a general appropriation bill is exposed to a point of order under clause 2(a).

Clause 2(b) addresses language rather than amounts. It bars provisions changing existing law in a reported general appropriation bill, and it bars amendments to such a bill that would change existing law as well. The reach across both the reported text and floor amendments matters, because legislative language can enter a bill by either route, and the rule closes both routes to the same category of provision. A provision that changes existing law does not merely decide how much money a program receives. It revises the law that governs the program, and clause 2(b) assigns that kind of revision to legislation considered apart from the general appropriation bill. The test the rule states is the effect of the provision: whether it changes existing law. A provision that works within existing law rather than altering it is not caught by the bar.

The clause states one exception on its face, and the exception has a name. Germane provisions that retrench expenditures by reducing the amounts covered by the bill are permitted, under the exception known as the Holman rule. Each element of the exception limits it. The provision must be germane, meaning it must belong to the subject of the bill to which it is attached rather than ranging into unrelated matter. The provision must retrench expenditures, meaning its direction is toward saving rather than spending. And the retrenchment must work by reducing the amounts covered, tying the saving to the sums in the bill itself. A provision that changes existing law and meets those conditions falls within the exception. A provision that changes existing law in order to enlarge an activity, to redirect a program to new purposes, or to impose new policy unrelated to reducing the amounts in the bill falls outside the exception and remains subject to the bar. The Holman rule exception therefore does not open the appropriation bill to legislation in general. It opens the bill to one narrow kind of legislative provision, a germane provision whose function is to cut the spending in front of the House.

A second category of provision stands outside the bar by the rule’s own treatment, and it is the category on which much rider practice rests. Limitation provisions that merely limit the use of funds, without changing existing law, are in order. The distinction is between directing what the law shall be and restricting what the money in the bill may be used for. A limitation takes the second form. It does not rewrite a statute, repeal a program’s authority, or command an agency to carry out a new policy. It states that funds provided in the act are not available for a specified use. Because such a provision leaves existing law as it found it and operates only on the funds in the bill, clause 2 does not treat it as a provision changing existing law. A policy objective written as a change to existing law invites a point of order under clause 2(b) unless the Holman rule exception covers it. The same objective written as a limitation on the use of funds has a recognized place on the bill, provided the wording stays on the limitation side of the line and does not, in substance, change the law it touches.

Senate Rule Sixteen: A Point of Order That Must Be Raised

Senate Rule XVI approaches the same problem from the direction of amendments. Paragraph 2 governs the Appropriations Committee. It bars the committee from reporting amendments proposing new or general legislation, and it attaches a consequence that gives the bar its force. If a point of order against such an amendment is sustained, the result is recommittal: the bill is sent back to committee. The penalty therefore falls on the bill and not only on the offending amendment. A senator who raises the point of order under paragraph 2, and persuades the presiding officer to sustain it, does not simply remove an amendment from consideration. The sustained objection returns the measure to the Appropriations Committee, a consequence that affects the schedule of the bill, the position of every other provision in it, and the willingness of senators to press an objection whose effect is so broad.

Paragraph 4 governs the floor. It bars floor amendments proposing general legislation on appropriations bills, and it states the standard that floor amendments must meet in germaneness terms. An amendment to an appropriations bill in the Senate must be germane to the bill or germane to the pending amendment to which it is offered. An amendment that proposes general legislation fails that structure twice over: it brings legislative matter onto a spending bill, and the legislative matter, to be offered at all, would still have to satisfy the germaneness requirement that paragraph 4 imposes. The paragraph thus works as both a subject matter bar and a relevancy rule. The subject of the amendment decides whether it belongs on the bill, and its relationship to the bill or to the pending amendment decides whether it belongs at the point in the proceedings where it is offered.

Two structural features of Rule XVI limit its reach, and both features are stated in the practice the rule has produced. First, Rule XVI does not prohibit legislative language that the Appropriations Committee itself originates. The rule’s committee paragraph is directed at amendments the committee reports, and legislative language that the committee places in a bill through its own drafting stands in a different position from an amendment proposing general legislation. Second, Rule XVI does not prohibit legislative language that arrives in a conference report. A conference report reaches the Senate as a finished product of negotiation between the chambers, presented for approval or disapproval as a whole, and the rule does not supply a point of order that strips legislative provisions from such a report. The two gaps reflect the points at which the Senate has chosen to let its appropriations process carry legislative matter: language the committee charged with the bills has written itself, and language settled between the two chambers and returned for a final vote.

Enforcement supplies the third limiting feature, and it is the feature on which the operation of the rule most plainly depends. Rule XVI is enforced through a point of order, and a point of order exists only when a senator raises it. No officer of the Senate patrols the text of an appropriations bill in search of general legislation, and no provision falls automatically because it might have been subject to an objection that no senator chose to make. A senator must decide that the objection is worth the raising, must raise it at the proper point in the proceedings, and must accept the consequences that follow if the objection is sustained, up to and including the recommittal of the bill under paragraph 2. Where no senator raises the point of order, the legislative provision remains in the bill and moves with it. The rule in the Senate is therefore best understood as a right held by individual senators rather than a screen applied to every bill. Its text states a prohibition. Its operation depends on a member’s decision to invoke it.

What happens when a Senate Rule Sixteen point of order is sustained?

Under paragraph two, the consequence falls on the whole bill rather than only on the offending amendment. A sustained point of order against an amendment proposing general legislation sends the bill back to the Appropriations Committee. That broad effect shapes the schedule and discourages senators from raising the objection at all.

The Waiver: How the Rules Are Set Aside

A chamber that writes its own rules also keeps the means to set them aside for a particular measure, and both chambers use those means on appropriations bills as a matter of documented routine. In the House, the instrument is the special rule. The Rules Committee reports a resolution that governs consideration of a bill, and such a special rule may waive points of order against the bill, including points of order under Rule XXI, clause 2. Adoption of the special rule by the House sets the specified points of order aside for that bill, so that provisions that would otherwise have been subject to objection are considered without the objection lying against them. The waiver is specific in two senses. It is specific to the measure named in the special rule, and it extends as far as the text of the special rule provides, no farther. The underlying rule remains in force for the next bill, and the next general appropriation bill requires its own special rule if its provisions are to receive the same protection.

The waiver practice extends to the end of the process as well as the beginning. Rule XXII, clause 5, permits special rules to waive points of order against conference reports. A conference report returns to the House carrying the settled text of a bill, often including matter that originated in neither chamber’s reported version in its final form. Without protection, points of order against provisions in such a report could unravel a negotiated settlement at the moment of final approval. Clause 5 allows the Rules Committee to propose, and the House to adopt, a special rule that waives those points of order for the report under consideration, so that the House votes on the conference report as a settlement rather than reopening its contents provision by provision. The same logic that governs the initial consideration of an appropriations bill thus governs its final form: the House may enforce its rule against legislating on the bill, or it may vote to set the rule aside for that bill, and the choice is made openly, by vote, on the special rule itself.

In the Senate, the corresponding instrument is unanimous consent. Senators may agree, without objection, to set aside the operation of Rule XVI for a provision or for a measure, and an agreement of that kind requires the acquiescence of every senator present to the request. Unanimous consent reflects the general character of Senate procedure, in which the formal rules frame the proceedings and consent agreements arrange them for a particular bill. Alongside formal waiver by consent stands a simpler practice with the same effect: the point of order is not raised. Because Rule XVI operates only through an objection, a decision by every senator to let a provision pass without objection leaves the provision in the bill as surely as a formal waiver would. The record of a given bill may therefore show no waiver at all, not because the rule was satisfied, but because the enforcement step the rule requires was never taken.

The neighboring enforcement system of the budget process works in the same general way, through points of order that members may raise or decline to raise and that chambers may waive under their own procedures. the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 supplied a framework of budget enforcement that rests, as the appropriations rules do, on objections available to members during consideration of a measure. Placed side by side, the two systems show a common design in congressional procedure: a written rule states the prohibition, a point of order supplies the remedy, and a waiver mechanism, by special rule in the House or by consent or silence in the Senate, supplies the release. The prohibition, the remedy, and the release are all parts of the same procedural order, and appropriations bills move through that order year by year with the rules applied to some provisions, waived for others, and never invoked against the rest.

Why Limitation Language Survives

The durability of the limitation rider follows from the drafting choice at its center. A limitation is worded as a restriction on the money in the act, in the standard form that no funds made available by the act may be used for a stated purpose, rendered in the recurring phrase: none of the funds made available by this Act may be used to carry out a specified activity. Every element of that sentence does procedural work. The subject of the sentence is the funds, not the program and not the agency. The funds are identified as the funds made available by this Act, tying the restriction to the appropriations in the measure in front of the chamber. The operative words deny a use: the funds may not be used for the purpose named. The sentence does not state that the activity is unlawful. It does not amend the statute that authorizes the activity. It does not direct the agency administering the program to adopt a different policy as a matter of permanent law. It closes one source of money to one use for the period covered by the appropriation, and it does nothing else.

That restraint in wording is what keeps the provision on the spending side of the line that House Rule XXI, clause 2, draws. The clause bars provisions changing existing law, and a limitation, by its terms, changes no law. The authority under which an agency acts remains in the statute books in the same words. The duties and permissions that existing law establishes remain as they were. What changes is the availability of the funds in the act for a particular purpose, and deciding which purposes the funds in an appropriations act may serve is the ordinary business of an appropriations act. A drafter who writes a policy objective in the form of an amendment to existing law hands any opponent a point of order under clause 2(b), subject only to the narrow Holman rule exception for germane retrenchments. A drafter who writes the same objective as a limitation hands an opponent no such objection, because the rule itself places limitations in order. The form is not a disguise laid over a legislative provision. It is a different and lesser legal act, a refusal to fund, and the rules recognize the difference.

The limitation form also carries consequences that follow from its limits, and those consequences explain the pattern of renewal that limitation riders display. Because the restriction attaches to the funds made available by a particular act, its force runs with those funds. When the act’s period ends, a successor act that omits the limitation leaves the underlying law exactly where it stood, free of the restriction, because the restriction never entered the underlying law. A limitation rider that its supporters wish to maintain must therefore be carried again in the next appropriations act, and the repeated drafting exercise is the price of the procedural safety the form provides. Permanent change requires a permanent law, enacted through the legislative process that the appropriations rules guard. A limitation accepts annual renewal instead, in exchange for a place on the bill that the rules leave open.

The limitation endures, then, not because the rules failed to reach it, but because the rules were written around the distinction it embodies. Congress may decline to pay for an activity without forbidding the activity, and it may forbid the activity only through legislation. The first decision belongs on an appropriations bill by the terms of Rule XXI, clause 2. The second decision belongs elsewhere, and the same clause says so. Riders written in limitation form survive changes in party control, changes in committee leadership, and the points of order raised and waived around them, because the form asks for the one thing an appropriations act is built to give or withhold. Drafters who understand the line the rules draw write on the funding side of it, in the language of funds made available and uses denied, and the provisions they produce are the ones still standing when the procedural objections have been spent.

Policy by Annual Rider

The Abortion Funding Limitation

The longest-running limitation rider in the annual appropriations process restricts the use of federal funds for abortion, and it entered the statute books on September 30, 1976. On that date the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare Appropriation Act, 1977 became law as P.L. 94-439. That enactment, a general appropriation act for fiscal year 1977, carried the provision that has been renewed, in changing forms, in every cycle since. Named for its sponsor, Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, the Hyde Amendment provided that none of the funds contained in the act could be used to perform abortions except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the pregnancy were carried to term.

The mechanics of the provision matter more than its origin for understanding how riders work. The Hyde Amendment was not a free-standing statute and it did not amend the Medicaid statute, which is the program through which most of the affected funding flows. It was a limitation written into an annual appropriation act, and a limitation of that kind binds only the funds that the act itself makes available. When the fiscal year covered by P.L. 94-439 ended, the restriction would have ended with it. Its continuation depended on drafters of the next Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare appropriation act writing a successor provision into that act, and on the same step being repeated in each of the acts that followed. The policy therefore exists in a state of permanent renewal. It has been the law, in the sense that it has governed the use of appropriated funds, for more than four decades, and it has never at any point been enacted as permanent law.

The content of the rider has not been constant across that span. The version first enacted in 1976 contained a single exception, for the life of the mother. Later versions added exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape and from incest, and the wording, the placement, and the surrounding provisions have been adjusted from act to act. A rider that must be rewritten into a new law every year is exposed to revision every year, and the Hyde limitation shows the pattern in both directions. Each annual appropriation act for the departments concerned is an occasion on which the exception list can be widened, narrowed, or left alone, and an occasion on which the provision can be dropped altogether if a majority declines to carry it forward. That none of those annual occasions has ended the practice is a fact about successive appropriations decisions, not about any single enactment. The rider’s durability is an artifact of the process that carries it. It survives because it is reenacted, and it must be reenacted because of the vehicle that carries it.

For the taxonomy that this series builds, the Hyde Amendment is the standard exhibit for the limitation rider in its purest form. It governs a subject of national policy. It has done so continuously since 1976. It sits in none of the permanent statutes it affects, and a reader of the Medicaid statute will not find it there. The article in this series that covers the substance of the program the rider restrains is the account of the Medicaid statute’s structure, and the two texts, the permanent statute and the annual limitation, have to be read together to state what the funding law of any given year actually was.

Research and Data: Two Firearms Riders

Two riders first enacted seven years apart show the limitation form applied to the production and release of information, and both ride in the annual acts that fund the departments concerned.

The first restricts federally funded research. In the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 1997, P.L. 104-208, signed on September 30, 1996, Congress wrote a provision into the appropriation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control could be used to advocate or promote gun control. The provision is associated with Representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas and is known as the Dickey Amendment. The same enactment reduced the agency’s injury prevention appropriation by 2.6 million dollars, a figure that corresponded to the amount the agency had spent on firearms research in the preceding year. The wording of the rider is a funding limitation in the standard form. It does not prohibit research as such, and it does not amend any authorizing statute. It fences off a use of the appropriated funds named in the act, and because the fence is written into an annual act, it has required annual renewal to remain in force. In 2011 the same restriction was extended to the appropriation for the National Institutes of Health, so that the limitation followed the money across the two principal channels of federal health research funding.

The second rider restricts the disclosure of records that the government already holds. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives maintains records of firearms traces, the histories assembled when a firearm recovered by law enforcement is traced through the records of manufacturers, dealers, and purchasers. Beginning with the fiscal year 2003 cycle, annual appropriations acts have carried provisions, associated with Representative Todd Tiahrt of Kansas and known as the Tiahrt Amendments, limiting what the bureau may release. The first of these provisions was enacted on February 20, 2003, in the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution for fiscal year 2003, P.L. 108-7, and it barred the bureau from disclosing trace data in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Provisions carried in the fiscal year 2004 cycle broadened the arrangement, addressing the bureau’s handling of dealer inventory records and the period within which approved background check records were to be destroyed. The Congressional Research Service has tracked the Tiahrt provisions across successive acts as a recurring rider, cataloguing the changes in wording from year to year in the manner of its reports on recurring appropriations provisions.

The two riders make an instructive pair because their surfaces are so different and their machinery is identical. One fences funds for research at the agencies that would perform it. The other fences an agency’s release of data that its own operations generate, and it operates in part by reference to a disclosure statute, the Freedom of Information Act, that belongs to a different legislative family entirely. Neither provision appears in the statute that authorizes the underlying activity, and neither was enacted as a permanent amendment to those statutes. Each persists in the only way a limitation rider can persist, by being written again into the next annual act. The firearms statutes themselves, covered in this series in the account of the Gun Control Act of 1968, state the permanent law of the subject. The riders state the annual law of the money, and for the agencies concerned the annual law of the money is the law that determines what can be done.

The State Program Rider

A third pattern appears when the rider runs in the opposite direction, restraining federal enforcement against a state program rather than restraining the program itself. The leading instance was enacted on December 16, 2014, as section 538 of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2015, P.L. 113-235, the act known in the reporting of that cycle as the cromnibus. Section 538 provided that none of the funds made available in the act to the Department of Justice could be used to prevent the states listed in the provision from implementing their own laws authorizing the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana. The provision is associated with Representatives Dana Rohrabacher of California and Sam Farr of California and is known by their names.

The rider’s target was a relationship between two bodies of law. Marijuana remained a controlled substance under federal law, and the Department of Justice held enforcement authority that reached conduct the listed states had chosen to permit under their own medical marijuana laws. Section 538 did not amend the federal controlled substances statute, did not reschedule any substance, and did not disturb the department’s authority as a matter of permanent law. It withdrew, for the period of the act, the funds that enforcement against state-compliant conduct would have required. The analysis of that federal and state relationship belongs to the article in this series on federal drug law and state legalization, and section 538 is the appropriations instrument that the analysis has to account for, because during the periods the rider has been in force the operative federal position was set by an annual funding provision rather than by the statute it restrained.

The rider also generated the litigation that defines the legal reach of its form. In United States v. McIntosh, decided in 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit considered the effect of the successor provision to section 538 on federal prosecutions of individuals whose conduct complied with state medical marijuana law. The court held that the rider, by prohibiting the Department of Justice from spending funds to prevent states from implementing their laws, barred the department from prosecuting such individuals while the rider remained in effect, and it remanded the consolidated cases for hearings on compliance with state law. The decision is a careful statement of what a funding limitation is. The court did not hold that the underlying statute had changed, and it observed that when the appropriations act carrying the rider expired, the department’s authority to spend on such prosecutions would return unless Congress renewed the provision. A policy of national scope, affecting prosecutions in the listed states, thus rested on a sentence in an annual act and on the annual decision to write the sentence again.

The Rider That Was Never Enacted

The appropriations process also produces rider campaigns that dominate a funding cycle and leave no law behind, and the clearest instance in the period this article covers is the effort to prohibit federal funding for executive grants of deferred action in immigration enforcement.

Deferred action is a form of administrative relief under which the executive branch announces that a defined class of individuals will not be made a priority for removal for a stated period. Opponents of the deferred action programs announced in 2012 and 2014 sought to stop them through the appropriations power, on the theory that a program Congress will not fund is a program the executive cannot run. The House of Representatives adopted the strategy in two forms. In 2014 it passed a stand-alone bill, H.R. 5272, whose operative provisions would have barred the consideration of applications for deferred action. In January 2015 the House passed its fiscal year 2015 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security with amendments that would have prohibited the use of funds to carry out the deferred action programs. Had either measure become law, the funding prohibition would have taken the legal form of the riders described in the preceding sections.

Neither measure became law. The department’s funding for the remainder of fiscal year 2015 was enacted on March 4, 2015, in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015, P.L. 114-4, and that act did not contain the deferred action funding prohibitions. The weeks before its passage were consumed by a funding standoff in which the department operated under short-term continuing resolutions while the two chambers disputed the riders, and the dispute ended with a clean funding act. The Congressional Research Service, in its reference work on the deferred action programs, states the outcome in the plainest available form. No legislation on deferred action for childhood arrivals has been enacted. The sentence covers the whole of the campaign. The prohibitions were adopted by one chamber in appropriations form, were the subject of the cycle’s central funding fight, and do not appear in any appropriations act.

The episode belongs in a taxonomy of riders because it marks the boundary of the instrument. A rider is a provision in an enacted act, and its force comes entirely from enactment. The deferred action prohibitions had everything a rider has except enactment: a vehicle, since the department’s funding bill had to pass in some form, a drafting form identical to the limitation riders that fill the statute books, and a majority of one chamber committed to them. What they lacked was the agreement of the second chamber and presentment, and in their absence the funding of the department proceeded under an act whose text said nothing about the subject at all. Accounts of the period sometimes describe the prohibitions as though they had operated, and precision on the point is part of the record this series keeps. They were proposed, debated, and adopted by the House. They were not enacted, they never governed the use of any appropriated funds, and the litigation over the deferred action programs themselves, covered in this series in the article on immigration law in the Supreme Court, proceeded on constitutional and administrative law grounds that owed nothing to any appropriations rider.

A Sentence That Changed Permanent Law

The final exhibit breaks the pattern the preceding sections establish, and its difference is the reason it is catalogued here. Section 629 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2004, P.L. 108-199, signed on January 23, 2004, directed the Federal Communications Commission to set the national television ownership cap at 39 percent of United States television households. The provision occupied a single sentence in a consolidated appropriations act, and it was not a limitation on the use of funds. It was a direction to an agency to adopt a stated rule, written into an appropriations act because the act was the vehicle certain to move.

The sentence was aimed at a regulatory dispute then in progress. The commission had adopted ownership rules in 2003 that would have set the national cap at 45 percent, the rules were contested in litigation and in Congress, and section 629 resolved the contested figure by statute. Its placement in an appropriations act has attracted comment for the mismatch between vehicle and content, but the legally significant feature of the provision is the opposite of the feature that defines the riders above. The funding limitations in this article expire with their acts and live by renewal. Section 629 amended permanent law. The 39 percent cap did not need to be written into the fiscal year 2005 act, or any later act, to remain in force, and the same legislation adjusted the commission’s recurring review of its ownership rules on a permanent basis, setting the review on a quadrennial cycle and placing the statutory cap outside the set of rules the review could disturb. A reader looking for the cap finds it in communications law, where the article in this series on the Telecommunications Act of 1996 treats it as part of that statute’s working structure.

The contrast completes the taxonomy. The omnibus vehicle carries at least three distinct kinds of cargo, and they are easily confused because they travel together in a single enactment. There are the appropriations themselves, which expire by design at the end of the fiscal year. There are the limitation riders, which borrow the vehicle’s annual life and achieve continuity only through annual reenactment, governing national policy for decades in Hyde’s case without ever entering the permanent statutes they qualify. And there are provisions like section 629, permanent law in full, which use the appropriations act as a conveyance and then detach from it, surviving every subsequent appropriations cycle without renewal. Determining which kind of provision a given sentence of an omnibus act is, whether it will lapse in September, return by inertia in the next act, or stand until repealed, is the first analytical step in reading any consolidated appropriations act, and it is the step on which the rider ledger maintained in this series is built.

How did one sentence in a spending act settle the television ownership cap?

Section 629 directed the Federal Communications Commission to set the national television ownership cap at thirty nine percent of households. The sentence resolved a contested figure in litigation and in Congress, and it amended permanent law, so the cap remained in force without renewal in later appropriations acts.

The Rider Ledger

The ledger below catalogues the long-running riders treated in this article. Each entry names the provision in the short form used across the series, states the subject it governs, gives the year it first appeared, and points to the article in this series that covers the substance of that subject in full. Read together, the entries show the range of the practice: most are limitation provisions, renewed in annual appropriations acts and worded as limits on the use of funds, and most govern subjects far removed from the funding decisions in the bills that carry them. Two entries carry flags that a reader should hold in mind. One entry is flagged because the prohibitions it records were adopted by one chamber and never enacted, so its place in the ledger is a record of an attempt rather than of governing law. One other entry is flagged because it amended permanent law rather than limiting funds, so it sits in the ledger by its placement in an appropriations act, not by the form it took.

Rider	Subject governed	First appeared	Covering article in this series
The Hyde limitation	Federal funding for abortion through the Medicaid program	1976	How the Medicaid Statute Is Built
The Dickey restriction	Federal firearms research funding at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health	1996	The Gun Control Act of 1968: Full Guide
The Tiahrt restrictions	Disclosure of firearms trace data held by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives	2003	Federal vs State Firearms Law
The state program rider	Federal enforcement against state medical marijuana programs	2014	Federal Drug Law vs State Legalization
The deferred action prohibitions	Federal funding for executive grants of deferred action (adopted by the House; not enacted)	2015	Immigration Law in the Supreme Court
The ownership cap sentence	The national television station ownership cap in communications law	2004	The Telecommunications Act of 1996

Must-Pass Gravity

An omnibus appropriations act derived its force from a simple condition: the money in the act had to move, or large parts of the federal government would have no authority to spend. The Antideficiency Act barred spending without appropriations. When a fiscal year ended on September 30 and a new fiscal year began on October 1 without enacted appropriations, the legal basis for obligations in the affected area stopped. A continuing resolution could extend prior year rates and conditions for a period, and a full year continuing resolution could carry an entire year on that basis, but a continuing resolution was itself a law that had to pass both chambers and receive a signature. The alternative to agreement was not the prior arrangement continuing without action. The alternative was a lapse, with shutdown procedures as the documented consequence.

That condition distinguished appropriations packages from most other legislation. A freestanding bill that failed left the underlying law in place. An appropriations package that failed left funding unresolved against a fixed calendar date. Participants therefore bargained under a deadline that imposed costs for delay itself, apart from disagreement over any single provision. Since fiscal year 1977, all regular appropriations acts had been enacted by the start of the fiscal year in only four years: fiscal year 1977, fiscal year 1989, fiscal year 1995, and fiscal year 1997, according to the Congressional Research Service. In other years, completion depended on continuing resolutions, packages that combined most or all of the remaining bills, or both in sequence.

Packaging changed the scale of the decision that the deadline produced. Twelve regular bills considered separately presented twelve occasions for disagreement, amendment, and delay. A single omnibus, or a consolidated appropriations act in the formal title that most modern packages carried, combined most or all of the remaining bills into one act, and often carried other matter as well. A minibus performed the same operation for a few bills. Once bills were combined, the deadline applied to the combination as a unit. Objection to one account, one limitation, or one rider confronted the funding for every other bill folded into the same text. The arithmetic favored completion of the package as assembled, because the cost of reopening it was measured against the cost of a lapse for the whole range of activities it funded. Scale reinforced the arithmetic, in texts counted at 1,603 pages for the fiscal year 2015 cromnibus, Public Law 113-235, at 2,232 pages for the fiscal year 2018 act, Public Law 115-141, and at 5,593 pages for the fiscal year 2021 act, Public Law 116-260, counted by the Senate Historical Office as the longest bill ever passed by Congress. A provision attached to such a vehicle borrowed the deadline, the scale, and the binary choice that belonged to the funding at its core.

The Four Corners Table

Packages were assembled in negotiation among the leadership of the appropriations committees and the party leaders, a grouping described as the four corners, rather than built by open floor amendment. That location of the decisive bargaining shaped every later stage. At the four corners table, the central work consisted of tradeoffs across bills, accounts, and policy provisions in a single negotiation, where a concession in one title could be balanced against a gain in another title that a floor process would have considered on a different day and under a different coalition. The package that emerged reflected the set of tradeoffs the negotiators could accept as a whole, not a sequence of separate majorities assembled provision by provision.

Once a package was assembled, amendment opportunities shrank and each chamber faced a finished text. The shrinkage was a structural feature of the vehicle. A finished package depended on balance among its parts. An amendment that struck a rider, increased an account, or altered a limitation threatened the balance that had secured agreement, and an amendment adopted in one chamber required the other chamber to accept a changed text or reopen negotiation against the deadline. Floor consideration therefore tended to present the package for approval or rejection in the form negotiated. The fiscal year 2022 cycle illustrated the compression. Text of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, Public Law 117-103, was released in the early hours of March 9, 2022. The House passed the act the same day in two votes, 260 to 171 and 361 to 69. The Senate passed the act on March 10, 2022, by 68 to 31, and the act was signed on March 15, 2022. Four continuing resolutions had preceded the act, running through December 3, February 18, March 11, and March 15, and the interval between release of a text counted at 2,741 pages at introduction and House passage was measured in hours on a single day.

The decline of formal conference committees accompanied the rise of packaging. Formal conferences fell from 38 in the 106th Congress to 9 in the 110th Congress, and conference reports largely disappeared as packaging replaced conferencing. A conference committee produced a report that reconciled two chamber passed texts, each of which had passed through floor consideration in its chamber. A package negotiated at the four corners table had no equivalent pair of floor passed texts to reconcile. The record for a package was instead supplied by explanatory statements printed in the Congressional Record. The Congressional Research Service described those statements as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act, and courts and agencies worked from the text plus those statements. The Government Accountability Office Red Book treated explanatory statement language as non-binding unless the language was incorporated by reference in the act itself. Direction that appeared only in an explanatory statement therefore carried a different legal status from direction enacted in the statutory text, even where participants treated the statement as the agreed explanation of the package.

One Signature for Everything

Presentment placed a single binary choice at the end of the process. A package that passed both chambers went to the president as one bill, and the president signed the bill or vetoed the bill. No partial veto allowed a signature for the funding titles and a rejection for a rider, an account, or a change to permanent law carried in the same text. The Supreme Court struck down the Line Item Veto Act in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998, and the statute that would have authorized cancellation of individual provisions after signature did not survive that decision. The choice structure that remained after 1998 was the structure that had governed before the statute: one signature for everything in the enrolled bill, or one veto for everything in the enrolled bill.

That structure altered the calculation for a president who objected to part of a package. A veto did not isolate the objection. A veto returned the entire funding instrument to Congress against the same deadline that had produced the package, with a lapse or a further continuing resolution as the near term alternatives, and an override required two thirds support in each chamber. A president who judged the funding necessary, or who judged the cost of a lapse higher than the cost of an objectionable provision, signed the package with the provision included. Signing despite stated objections was therefore a structural outcome of the binary choice rather than an aberration in any single administration. The outcome followed from the combination of a deadline, a combined text, and the absence of a partial veto.

The fiscal year 2018 cycle provided the clearest stated example. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2018, Public Law 115-141, ran to 2,232 pages and was signed on March 23, 2018, a day after House passage. At signing, the president said publicly that he would never sign another bill like it. The statement recorded an objection to the form and content of the instrument at the moment of signature, and the signature nevertheless enacted the instrument in full, including every account, limitation, and provision in the text. No mechanism allowed the signature to enact the funding and exclude the matter that prompted the statement. A veto would have rejected the funding along with the objection, while a signature accepted the objection along with the funding, and the deadline weighed on the side of signature.

Other large packages presented the same choice without an equivalent public statement. The fiscal year 2021 act combined all twelve appropriations bills with pandemic relief in a single instrument of 5,593 pages, passed both chambers on December 21, 2020, and was signed on December 27, 2020. The fiscal year 2022 act combined twelve bills, 13.6 billion dollars in Ukraine emergency aid, and the return of earmarks as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate, at a total of 1.5 trillion dollars. The Bipartisan Policy Center, compiling committee lists, counted nearly 5,000 projects and more than 9.6 billion dollars in that return. Severing any category on presentment was not an available option. The signature enacted the categories together, because the chambers had passed them together. Negotiators could therefore include a provision that the president disliked, within limits set by the risk of a veto, if the negotiators judged that the president would sign the package for the sake of the funding or of another provision in the same text. The objection addressed a provision. The signature addressed a package, under a deadline, with no partial alternative. The unit of presentment, not the label of the vehicle, determined the protection.

The Deadline as a Weapon

The fiscal deadline converted disagreement into shutdown risk. Under the Antideficiency Act, agencies lacked authority to spend in the absence of appropriations, so a disagreement that might have produced delay in another legislative context produced a funding lapse in the appropriations context if the disagreement outlasted the available appropriations and any continuing resolution. The standing demonstrations were the shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, the shutdown of 2013, and the shutdowns of 2018 and 2019, the longest of which ran for thirty-five days. Each episode established, for later negotiators, that the risk was not theoretical, and that a lapse imposed operational and political costs whose existence no participant could discount in a later negotiation.

A deadline of that kind functioned as a weapon in bargaining because control over delay was uneven. A participant who could tolerate a lapse longer than another participant, or who believed that public attribution of blame for a lapse would fall on another participant, could hold a position past a deadline with less expected cost. A participant who needed a particular agency funded, a particular program continued, or a particular provision enacted in the package faced rising costs as the deadline approached, because failure of the package meant failure of that need as well. Demands attached to a package therefore gained force from timing alone. A provision offered as a condition of agreement in the final days before a lapse confronted opponents with a compressed choice between acceptance of the provision and responsibility for a package that failed on schedule. The same provision offered months earlier, on a freestanding track, confronted opponents with a choice between acceptance and continued debate, a materially different cost structure.

Continuing resolutions mediated the weapon without removing it. A continuing resolution extended prior year rates and conditions for a period, which could run for days or for a full year, and anomalies written into a continuing resolution could change a rate or condition for a particular case. Agreement on a continuing resolution reset the deadline to a later date and lowered the immediate risk of a lapse, at the price of extending prior year arrangements that participants on several sides had sought to replace. The fiscal year 2022 cycle required four continuing resolutions before the consolidated act passed. Each extension preserved funding and postponed the final bargain. The thirty-five day shutdown of 2018 and 2019 demonstrated the opposite possibility, that a deadline could pass without agreement and a lapse could extend for weeks while positions remained unresolved.

The fiscal year 2019 cycle displayed both operations in sequence. Five bills were enacted in two minibuses before October 1, 2018, and those bills were removed from the end of year dispute. The remaining seven bills were not completed on the same schedule, the funding dispute produced the thirty-five day shutdown, and the remaining bills were finished in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019, Public Law 116-6, after the shutdown ended. Separation of the five bills narrowed the scope of the lapse and the scope of the bargain that ended it. The deadline weapon operated vehicle by vehicle. Bills that had already been enacted carried no shutdown risk. Bills still inside an unfinished vehicle carried the full risk, and provisions attached to those bills shared the risk and the force that the risk created. The deadline did not favor a fixed party, chamber, or branch across cycles. The shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, of 2013, and of 2018 and 2019 involved different configurations of party control and different precipitating disputes, and the common element was the mechanism, not the identity of the participant who gained. In each configuration, time was not neutral, because expiration of authority was itself an outcome that many participants ranked below almost any enacted package.

What Riders Gain from the Vehicle

A rider gained the momentum of the vehicle. A legislative rider, a policy provision carried on a spending bill, or a limitation rider worded as a limit on the use of funds, in the form that none of the funds made available may be used for a stated purpose, faced the ordinary obstacles of legislation if pursued as a separate bill: committee action, floor time, a majority in each chamber, reconciliation of different texts, and a signature, against opponents who could concentrate on that provision alone. Attachment to an appropriations package rearranged each obstacle. Committee action on the package was assured because the funding had to move. Floor time was assured for the same reason. Majorities for the package formed around the funding and around the overall bargain, not around the rider in isolation. Reconciliation of texts occurred inside the four corners negotiation. The signature decision addressed the package as a whole. A provision that could not pass on its own, or that had not passed on its own in prior attempts, could be enacted through attachment if the provision survived the negotiation that assembled the vehicle.

Removal arithmetic protected a rider after attachment. Striking a rider from an assembled package required reopening the negotiation, obtaining agreement from the negotiators who had accepted or traded for the rider, passing an amended text in both chambers, and completing each step before the funding deadline. Retention required no equivalent sequence. Retention was the default that followed from passage of the package as negotiated. Opponents therefore bore the burden of action, the burden of an alternative bargain, and the burden of delay, while supporters needed only to preserve the package. That distribution of burdens accounted for the longevity of recurring riders. The abortion funding restriction first enacted on September 30, 1976, as a rider on the fiscal year 1977 Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare appropriations act, Public Law 94-439, which barred use of Medicaid funds for abortion with exceptions that varied by version, was renewed annually after that first enactment and was never enacted as permanent law. Annual renewal through the vehicle, rather than permanent enactment on a separate track, was the form that persistence took.

Other recurring riders followed the same pattern. The firearms research funding restriction first enacted in 1996 in the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 1997, Public Law 104-208, barred injury prevention funds of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention being used to advocate or promote gun control, removed 2.6 million dollars, and was extended to funds of the National Institutes of Health in 2011. The law enforcement data publication restriction first enacted on February 20, 2003, in the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution for fiscal year 2003, Public Law 108-7, barred disclosure of firearms trace data in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, and was broadened in the fiscal year 2004 cycle. The state program enforcement restriction first enacted on December 16, 2014, in section 538 of Public Law 113-235, barred funds of the Department of Justice being used to prevent listed states from implementing state medical marijuana laws, and was enforced by the Ninth Circuit in United States v. McIntosh, 833 F.3d 1163, in 2016. Each entered law inside a package that carried funding for a far wider range of activities than the provision addressed.

The vehicle also attracted matter that changed permanent law and matter far from appropriations in subject. Section 629 of the fiscal year 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, Public Law 108-199, signed on January 23, 2004, directed the Federal Communications Commission to set the national television ownership cap at 39 percent of United States television households. Unlike the funding riders, that sentence amended permanent law, and the same act excluded the cap from the recurring section 202(h) review that the act made quadrennial. A separate communications bill would have faced the authorizing committee process and a presentment decision on that policy. Attachment placed the sentence inside a funding package, where the decision structure addressed the package. Attraction extended beyond any single subject because the underlying gain was general. Any provision whose supporters held a place in the four corners negotiation, or held votes that the negotiators needed for the package, could seek the protection of the vehicle. Provisions that lacked that place or those votes gained nothing, as the deferred action prohibitions of the fiscal year 2015 cycle showed. Prohibitions on using funds to carry out executive grants of deferred action were adopted by the House in its fiscal year 2015 Department of Homeland Security spending bill in January 2015 and in a standalone bill in 2014, but were not enacted: the enacted fiscal year 2015 department act, Public Law 114-4, in March 2015 omitted the prohibitions after a weeks long funding standoff in which the department ran on short term resolutions, and the Congressional Research Service stated that no legislation on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program had been enacted. The vehicle protected provisions that survived assembly and conferred no protection on provisions that assembly excluded. Scale completed the explanation. A package of 2,232 pages, or of 5,593 pages, contained thousands of funding decisions, and a rider inside such a text competed for attention against the funding for entire departments, against emergency aid, and against the deadline. Scarcity of attention favored retention, because a provision that attracted no concentrated opposition during the compressed consideration period passed with the vehicle by default.

The Case for the Package

The defense of the omnibus begins with a calendar, not with a preference for large bills. Under the framework of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, effective for fiscal year 1977, the fiscal year starts on October 1. From fiscal year 1977 onward, Congress enacted all of the regular appropriations acts by that start date in only four years: fiscal year 1977, fiscal year 1989, fiscal year 1995, and fiscal year 1997, as the Congressional Research Service records the record. The defense asks a narrow question: given a deadline that the regular process met four times in forty-five years, what procedure actually gets appropriations enacted? The answer offered by defenders of packaging is that the package is that procedure, not a corruption of some other procedure that was waiting to work. On this reading, the alternative to the omnibus in a given year was seldom twelve separate bills considered in sequence, passed by both chambers, reconciled, and signed before the fiscal year began. The alternative, in the pattern the record shows, was drift: another round of continuing resolutions extending prior year rates and conditions, another set of interim deadlines, and the same unsettled bills waiting at the end of it.

That defense gains force from what a continuing resolution is: a stopgap that extends prior year funding rates and conditions for a period, which can run for days or for a full year. The Antideficiency Act leaves Congress little choice but to pass something, because that act bars spending without appropriations, and a full year continuing resolution, of the kind that finished fiscal year 2007 and fiscal year 2011, is not regular order preserved. It is the prior year repeated, with new needs handled, if at all, through anomalies, the exceptions that change a rate or a condition. Defenders argue that a stopgap year is a year in which the process made almost no fresh decisions, whereas an omnibus at least contains fresh decisions on each account it covers. The comparison is never between the package and an ideal process, but between the package and the stopgap, the shutdown, or the unfinished year.

Fewer Cliffs, Real Trades

The strongest form of the defense rests on the structure of bargaining across bills. Twelve appropriations bills are not twelve independent decisions. The total for discretionary spending must be divided among them, priorities in one bill compete with priorities in another, and a member or a faction whose support is needed for the whole program may care intensely about one account and only weakly about the rest. Handled bill by bill, each measure must assemble its own majority from members judging that measure largely on its own contents, and a concession offered in one bill cannot easily be repaid in another, because the second bill may come to the floor weeks later, under a different alignment, with no binding connection to the first bargain. Handled as a package, the negotiation changes character. A single negotiation can settle trades that twelve separate bills cannot, because the parties can see the whole exchange at once: a concession in one bill paid for in another, restraint accepted in one title in return for a priority funded in a different title, objections withdrawn in one place because the corresponding gain appears in another place in the same text. The trade is enforceable in a way that a promise about a later bill is not, since all sides of the exchange are printed in the same measure and pass or fail together.

The same structure explains a second claim, that some bills cannot pass alone at all and the package is the only vehicle their funding will ever get. A bill carrying spending for an unpopular agency, or for programs with diffuse support and concentrated opposition, may never command a floor majority as a standalone measure, however routine its contents. Inside a package, that bill is no longer voted on in isolation. It is one part of a measure that also carries funding members need for other programs and for the operations of their own districts and states, and the question put to the chamber is whether the whole settlement is preferable to no settlement. The fiscal year 2022 act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 (H.R. 2471, P.L. 117-103), illustrates the point at the level of timing. It was preceded by four continuing resolutions, running through December 3, February 18, March 11, and March 15, before the package itself was signed on March 15, 2022. The separate process had five and a half months after October 1 and produced four stopgaps. The package produced the year.

A single vote also creates fewer shutdown cliffs than twelve. Each separate bill that remains unenacted as a deadline approaches is a separate cliff edge, of the kind that produced lapses in the 1995 to 1996 episode, in 2013, and in 2018 and 2019, when the shutdown lasted 35 days. The package breaks the sequence by converting many deadlines into one: one text, one negotiation, one passage in each chamber, and one signature decision. The president faces that decision for the whole package, with no partial veto available: the Supreme Court struck down the Line Item Veto Act in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), so a president who objects to one part cannot remove that part and sign the rest. The fiscal year 2018 experience shows the asymmetry in plain form: the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 (P.L. 115-141) was signed on March 23, 2018, and the signing president said publicly that he would never sign another bill like it. The defense reads that episode from the other side as well: a president who signs despite objections demonstrates that the package worked as a settlement no party could improve by reopening it, and the alternative, a veto of the entire funding law with a shutdown in prospect, is precisely the cliff the package exists to remove.

The Committee Objection, Answered and Unanswered

Against that record stands the committee objection, and the defense at its most honest does not dismiss it. Stated fairly, the objection is that packaging transfers the process from the committees and the floors to a small negotiating circle, and that the transfer defeats the procedures Congress wrote for itself. Packages are negotiated by the appropriations leadership and the party leaders, the four corners, rather than amended on open floors, and amendment opportunities shrink once a package is assembled. The objection begins earlier, at the markup, the committee session at which a bill is considered section by section and amended before it is reported. In the order the rules contemplate, each subcommittee holds hearings, marks up its bill, and answers for its choices; the full committee amends and reports; the floor amends further within the rules; and the other chamber repeats the process. House Rule XXI, clause 2, guards that order by barring appropriations for expenditures not previously authorized by law, and by barring provisions changing existing law in a reported general appropriation bill or in amendments to it, apart from a limited exception for germane provisions that retrench expenditures by reducing amounts, the Holman rule exception, and apart from limitation provisions that merely limit the use of funds without changing existing law. Senate Rule XVI guards a similar order: paragraph 2 bars the Appropriations Committee from reporting amendments proposing new or general legislation, on pain of the bill being recommitted if a point of order is sustained, and paragraph 4 bars floor amendments proposing general legislation, requiring amendments to be germane. The objection notes how routinely the guardrails are set aside. In the House, the prohibitions are waived routinely by special rules from the Rules Committee, and Rule XXII, clause 5, allows special rules to waive points of order against conference reports as well. In the Senate, Rule XVI does not prohibit legislative language that the Appropriations Committee itself originates or that arrives in conference reports, enforcement requires a senator to raise the point of order, waivers occur by unanimous consent, and in practice points of order are often simply not raised.

The deeper part of the objection is jurisdictional and deliberative rather than technical. Authorization committees exist to study programs and write the law that governs them, while appropriations committees exist to fund what the law authorizes. When policy is written into a funding bill, the authorizing committee that would have marked up that policy may never see it. The floor loses its part as well: a member who is neither an appropriator nor a leader confronts a finished text, thousands of pages in the largest cases, with the choice confined to passage or failure. The objection concedes that committees and floors were slow, and that the on-time record belongs in the argument. Its answer is that speed purchased by removing the stages at which a measure can be examined and amended is not the same achievement as speed within those stages.

The defense answers part of this, the part about authorship. Committee work does not disappear into a package: the bills that enter one were, in many cases, drafted in subcommittees, informed by hearings, and in some Congresses reported before the packaging began, so the text leadership negotiates over is largely committee text, adjusted and combined. The four corners are themselves drawn from the appropriations leadership. The defense also answers the rules argument on its own terms: the points of order were written by the chambers, and so were the waiver procedures and consent practices that set them aside. A chamber that waives its rule by a majority vote has used its procedures rather than suffered their violation.

What the defense does not answer is the deliberative core of the objection, and an honest statement of the case for the package leaves that core standing. Committee drafting upstream does not restore the markup of the package itself, because the package as a whole, with its final trades, its riders, and its settled totals, is never marked up by any committee and never opened to amendment in any chamber in the way a reported bill is opened. The waiver answer explains how the rules allow the result and not whether the result preserves the purposes the rules were written to serve, which were examination before enactment and a record of choices made in the open. Nor does the defense answer the jurisdictional complaint in its strongest form: a policy provision carried in funding language is law made within a negotiation to which the committee of jurisdiction was not a party, however experienced the negotiators were on the funding side. The defense establishes that packaging enacts funding that the separate process repeatedly failed to enact on time, and that the chambers permit it under their own rules. The objection establishes that enactment by package is purchased with committee deliberation, floor amendment, and jurisdictional order, and that the permission of the rules does not recover those losses.

What Packaging Costs

Scrutiny in Hours

The most measurable cost is time, or rather its compression at exactly the stage when the text is final. A package cannot be scrutinized before it exists, and it exists, as a complete and binding text, only when the negotiation closes, which in the documented pattern is close to the moment of passage. The fiscal year 2022 act supplies the clearest anchor within the April 2022 vantage of this article. Its text was released in the early hours of March 9, 2022, and the House passed it on the same day, in two votes, 260 to 171 and 361 to 69, on a measure counted at 2,741 pages at introduction and carrying $1.5 trillion in total, including $13.6 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine. The Senate passed it on March 10, by 68 to 31, and it was signed on March 15, 2022. Between the release of the complete text and House passage there were hours, not days, and within those hours members, staff, journalists, agencies, and affected parties were all reading the same 2,741 pages for the first time. The cost is structural: the stage of the process at which the whole legislature and the whole public can examine the actual law is the shortest stage in it.

The fiscal year 2021 act shows the same compression at greater length. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (P.L. 116-260) combined all twelve appropriations bills with pandemic relief and ran to 5,593 pages by the Senate Historical Office count, the longest bill ever passed by Congress. It passed both chambers on December 21, 2020, and was signed on December 27, 2020. A text of that length cannot be read in the interval between its assembly and its passage by more than a fraction of the members voting on it, and the scrutiny it received came after enactment as much as before. Earlier packages show the pattern at smaller scale: the fiscal year 2018 act (P.L. 115-141) ran to 2,232 pages and was signed on March 23, 2018, a day after House passage. The defense answers, correctly on the record, that delay in these years was not a neutral alternative, because the government was operating on expiring stopgaps and the choice at the end was between the package and another cliff. The answer addresses why the compression happened. It does not enlarge the hours in which the text could be examined, and the hours are the cost. A member who finds an error or an unwanted rider in the final text has no procedural remedy within the measure: the remedy is to vote against the funding of the government in full, or to seek correction in a later act.

A Thin Record of Intent

A second cost appears after enactment, in the materials available to anyone trying to determine what the enacted words were intended to do. Agencies and courts work from the text and from the record Congress left behind: committee reports, floor statements, and, in the older process, conference reports, in which the managers of the two chambers explained the final text they had reconciled. The packaged process leaves a thinner record, because the stage that generated the fullest explanations has largely disappeared. As packaging replaced conferencing, conference reports largely disappeared with it. The series documents the decline in formal conferences from 38 in the 106th Congress to 9 in the 110th Congress, and the package record that replaced the conference report is a different instrument. For a modern consolidated act, the explanatory statement printed in the Congressional Record serves as the record of the package, and anyone finding legislative history sources for such an act encounters that statement where an earlier act would have offered a conference report adopted as part of the legislative process in both chambers.

The status of that substitute record is unsettled in a way the older record was not, and the sources state the tension plainly. The Congressional Research Service describes the explanatory statements as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act, and courts and agencies work from the text plus those statements in practice. The Government Accountability Office, in its Red Book treatment of appropriations law, treats explanatory statement language as non-binding unless it is incorporated by reference into the act itself. Between those two positions lies a genuine interpretive exposure. Directions that members regard as settled instructions to an agency may rest entirely on statement language that the agency’s own legal framework classifies as guidance rather than law. An agency that departs from the statement can point to the enacted text and to the non-binding character of the statement, and a court asked to resolve the dispute inherits a record thinner and less formal than the record a conference report would have supplied. The problem compounds with scale: a package that settles twelve bills and carries policy riders generates questions of intent across the whole range of the government, and the explanations for all of it are concentrated in statements assembled at the end of the process, printed in the Congressional Record rather than reported, debated, and adopted as conference reports were. None of this establishes that any particular interpretation failed. It establishes the condition the record supports: as the conference stage contracted from 38 conferences to 9 across the Congresses the series documents, the authoritative account of what a funding law means came to rest on instruments whose legal weight the two sources describe in materially different terms.

Jurisdiction and the Vanishing Markup

The third cost falls on the committee system itself, and it falls unevenly. The appropriations committees do not lose by packaging; their leadership conducts the negotiation. The loss falls on the authorizing committees, and on the markup as the stage at which policy is written in the open by the committee that owns the subject. A rider carried on a spending bill can set policy for a program without any action by its authorizing committee. Limitation riders, worded as limits on the use of funds, in the form that none of the funds made available may be used for a stated purpose, are in order under House Rule XXI precisely because they limit funds without changing existing law. The abortion funding restriction first enacted on September 30, 1976, as a rider on the fiscal year 1977 Labor-HEW appropriations act (P.L. 94-439) was renewed annually ever since and never enacted as permanent law, so the policy on the use of Medicaid funds for abortion remained a product of the appropriations process rather than of the committees with jurisdiction over the Medicaid statute. The firearms research funding restriction first enacted in 1996 (P.L. 104-208) barred injury prevention funds of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from being used to advocate or promote gun control, and it was extended to the National Institutes of Health in 2011. The law enforcement data publication restriction first enacted on February 20, 2003 (P.L. 108-7) barred disclosure of firearms trace data in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, and the state program enforcement restriction first enacted on December 16, 2014, in section 538 of P.L. 113-235 barred the use of Department of Justice funds to prevent listed states from implementing their own medical marijuana laws. Each subject belonged in the first instance to authorizing committees, and each was governed, for as long as the rider was renewed, through funding language that those committees did not mark up.

Packaging intensifies the jurisdictional cost because the package is where riders are safest. A rider on a standalone bill can be challenged by a point of order and debated on the floor. The same rider inside a package of thousands of pages, presented hours before passage as part of a settlement that cannot be amended, faces neither exposure. The fiscal year 2015 Department of Homeland Security episode shows the mechanism, stated at exactly the strength the record supports. Prohibitions on using funds to carry out executive grants of deferred action were adopted by the House in its fiscal year 2015 Homeland Security spending bill in January 2015 and in a standalone bill in 2014 (H.R. 5272), but they were not enacted. The enacted fiscal year 2015 act for the department (P.L. 114-4, March 2015) omitted them after a weeks long funding standoff in which the department operated on short term resolutions, and the Congressional Research Service states that no legislation on deferred action has been enacted. The fight was resolved not in a markup of the immigration laws but in a negotiation over whether a funding act would carry the prohibitions. The exceptional case runs the other way. Section 629 of the fiscal year 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act (P.L. 108-199, signed January 23, 2004) directed the Federal Communications Commission to set the national television ownership cap at 39 percent of United States television households, and unlike the funding riders, that sentence amended permanent law, and it excluded the cap from the recurring review under section 202(h) that the same act made quadrennial. A sentence in a funding package thus became durable communications policy, without passage through the committees that held that jurisdiction. The markup did not merely lose a vote in such cases. The markup never occurred: no authorizing committee report explaining the choice, and no separate vote by which the chamber could accept the funding while rejecting the policy. What remains, on the evidence, is lawmaking that follows the calendar rather than the jurisdictional map.

Which committees lose ground when policy is written through a spending package?

The loss falls on the authorizing committees rather than on the appropriations committees, whose leadership conducts the package negotiation. A rider can govern a program without action by the committee holding jurisdiction over its statute, and the open markup at which that committee would write policy may never occur.

Earmarks: Out, Then Back In

An earmark, in the sense used for annual appropriations, was a direction written into a spending measure, or into the material that accompanied a spending measure, that set aside funds for a specific project in a specific place. The project had a name, a location, and a recipient that could be identified on the face of the list. That specificity separated an earmark from the other ways Congress allocated money. A formula program divided funds among states or localities by a rule written in law, and an agency competition divided funds among applicants by criteria the agency applied. An earmark divided funds by designation. A member asked for a project, a committee placed the project in a bill or in a report, and the money followed the designation rather than a formula or a competition.

That method had a long place inside appropriations practice before 2011, and the practice ended by internal decision rather than by a permanent statute that removed the tool from Congress. The sequence matters for understanding the return in fiscal 2022. Between 2011 and fiscal 2022, the absence of earmarks rested on chamber rules and leadership policy. In fiscal 2022, the presence of earmarks rested on a redesigned set of chamber and committee procedures that operated under different names. In the House, the restored practice was called Community Project Funding. In the Senate, the restored practice was called Congressionally Directed Spending. The two labels described the same basic act, a member directed request for a named project, carried inside a regular appropriations vehicle and disclosed under rules set for that cycle.

The first enactment under the restored system came in the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal 2022, Public Law 117-103, signed on March 15, 2022. The act was a full omnibus package. It totaled 1.5 trillion dollars, and it included 13.6 billion dollars in emergency aid for Ukraine. The text was released in the early hours of March 9, 2022, the House passed the measure on the same day in two votes of 260 to 171 and 361 to 69, the Senate passed the measure on March 10 by a vote of 68 to 31, and the president signed the measure on March 15, 2022. The measure had been preceded by four continuing resolutions that had carried funding through December 3, February 18, March 11, and March 15. The earmark lists rode inside that package, and the lists became law on the same signature and on the same schedule as the rest of the omnibus.

Scale was recorded by a named count that compiled the committee lists. The Bipartisan Policy Center, compiling the committee lists, counted nearly 5,000 projects and more than 9.6 billion dollars in the fiscal 2022 enactment. The return was not a handful of projects inserted as a test, and the return was not a restoration without limits. A capped, disclosed, and member limited system still produced a list that ran into the thousands, because the demand that the moratorium had suppressed for a decade had a large number of districts, states, and local sponsors behind it.

The Moratorium Decade

The moratorium began in 2011. The form the moratorium took explains both the durability of the ban and the ease of the return. The moratorium was put in force as chamber rules and leadership policy after the 2010 cycle. No permanent law in the record barred a future Congress, or a future leadership, from restoring designated projects by changing the rules and the policy that had removed the projects. A statutory ban would have required a statutory repeal. A rules based ban required a rules based decision, and leadership policy could be revised by the leaders who administered the appropriations process.

For the decade that followed, annual appropriations proceeded without member designated projects of the kind that had been listed before 2011. Agencies received funds through the regular accounts in the twelve annual bills, and through the packages that combined those bills when separate enactment failed, and allocation below the account level proceeded by the other two methods that appropriations law provided. Formula provisions in authorizing law and in appropriations text divided money by population, by need factors, by matching shares, and by other rules that applied across jurisdictions without naming a single recipient. Agency administered competitions and grant programs divided money by application and review. Both methods kept a distance between a member vote on a bill and a specific project in a specific district. A member voted for an account, a program total, and a set of rules. The member did not vote for a list that contained a named project that the member had requested.

The decade also demonstrated that the absence of earmarks did not restore separate, on time enactment of the twelve bills. Since fiscal 1977, all regular appropriations acts had been enacted by the start of the fiscal year on October 1 in only four years, fiscal 1977, fiscal 1989, fiscal 1995, and fiscal 1997. The years of the moratorium fell inside that longer pattern. Funding proceeded by continuing resolutions that extended prior year rates and conditions for a period, by anomalies that changed a rate or a condition inside a continuing resolution, and by omnibus and consolidated packages that combined most or all of the remaining bills at a late stage. Fiscal 2014 finished in a consolidated act that carried all twelve bills. Fiscal 2019 finished after a shutdown that lasted 35 days. Fiscal 2021 finished in a consolidated act that combined all twelve bills with pandemic relief. None of that history depended on the presence of earmarks, and the removal of earmarks did not change the structural pressures that produced packages.

The moratorium decade therefore left two facts in place at the same time. First, the tool of designation had been set aside by a method that a later leadership could reverse without passing a new authorizing law. Second, the vehicle that would carry any restored designations had only grown more consolidated during the absence. The bills that once might have carried a short list for a single department or agency, debated and amended as a separate measure, were in practice assembled by appropriations leadership and party leaders, described in the record as the four corners, and presented for passage as a combined text with limited opportunity for floor amendment. A restored practice designed for fiscal 2022 had to be designed for a leadership negotiated package, with disclosure and limits set in advance of assembly, because after assembly the opportunity to examine, amend, or remove an individual project on the floor was narrow.

The length of the absence also changed the mechanics of the return. Members, committee staff, and member office staff had operated for a decade without the annual cycle of request forms, vetting, and list publication that a designated project system required. Restoration therefore required more than permission. Restoration required a procedure, published in advance, with a request method, a disclosure method, a limit on the number of requests, a conflict certification, and an eligibility rule for recipients. The House design for fiscal 2022 supplied each of those elements in a named form, and the Senate design supplied a parallel form under a different name.

Community Project Funding

The House called the restored practice Community Project Funding. The name marked a break in presentation from the older term, and the procedure marked the conditions under which the House leadership and the Appropriations Committee allowed designated projects to return. Requests were posted publicly before action. Public posting changed the point at which a request became visible. Under the design, a member request was a public record at the request stage, before the committee acted on the request and before a bill that might contain the project reached the floor. A reader of the posted material could see which member had asked for which project, in which amount, and for which recipient, while the appropriations process was still in a position to include or exclude the request.

A cap of ten requests per member limited the volume that any single office could submit. The cap operated at the request stage rather than at the enactment stage, and the cap therefore shaped behavior before committee review began. An office with a long list of local proposals had to rank the proposals inside the office and submit only ten. The cap also placed a rough equality on access to the request system. A senior member and a junior member operated under the same numerical limit on submissions, even though committee review of the submissions remained a committee decision and inclusion in a bill remained a separate step from submission.

Certification of no financial interest addressed the conflict question in a direct form. A member who submitted a request certified that the member had no financial interest in the project. The certification was attached to the member rather than to the recipient alone, and the certification made the member personally responsible for the representation that accompanied the request. The design also barred for profit recipients. A private firm could not be the named recipient of a Community Project Funding project. That eligibility line separated the restored practice from a method of directing federal funds to a commercial beneficiary by name in an appropriations list.

An aggregate cap placed the final limit on the system as a whole. Projects were capped in total at one percent of discretionary spending. The aggregate cap meant that the list, however long, occupied a defined and small share of the discretionary total that the appropriations bills controlled. Inside the fiscal 2022 omnibus, the designated projects counted by the Bipartisan Policy Center at more than 9.6 billion dollars sat within that capped share of discretionary spending. The cap answered a scale objection in numerical form. Criticism of the size of the list could be measured against the one percent ceiling, and support for the list could point to the same ceiling as evidence that the restored practice was bounded by design.

The Senate operated a parallel practice under the name Congressionally Directed Spending, with similar disclosure. The Senate name retained the language of direction by Congress, and the Senate procedure shared the core premise of the House procedure, that a request would be disclosed rather than inserted without attribution. The two chamber systems were not identical in name, and the record describes the Senate disclosure as similar rather than identical, but the two systems converged on the same result for fiscal 2022. Requests from both chambers were resolved into project lists, the lists were compiled by the committees, and the projects that survived committee and leadership review were carried in the fiscal 2022 omnibus and enacted in Public Law 117-103.

Enactment completed the cycle that the design had started. A request that had been posted, capped, certified, and screened for recipient eligibility still had no legal effect as a request. Legal effect came only when the project appeared in an enacted appropriations act, or in material that the act incorporated or that accompanied the act as the authoritative explanation of intent. For appropriations packages, the record was supplied by explanatory statements printed in the Congressional Record, which the Congressional Research Service described as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act. The Government Accountability Office Red Book treated explanatory statement language as nonbinding unless the language was incorporated by reference into the act. The design of disclosure did not by itself create the legal force of a project. Enactment inside Public Law 117-103 created that force, on March 15, 2022.

Why Earmarks Live in Packages

District projects live in packages for structural reasons that follow from the way appropriations must move. Annual appropriations are must pass in a sense that authorizing legislation is not. The Antideficiency Act bars spending without appropriations, and an agency or program whose appropriation lapses faces a shutdown of the functions that depend on that appropriation. The standing risk when packages stalled was illustrated by the shutdowns of 1995 to 1996, 2013, and 2018 to 2019, the last of which lasted 35 days. A bill that carries the money to keep the government operating acquires a deadline pressure that a bill on a single policy subject does not carry in the same form. A project list attached to that bill shares the deadline pressure, and a project list attached to a bill without that pressure would face a separate vote, a separate coalition, and a separate risk of failure.

Consolidation increased the effect. A single appropriations bill for a single department could fail, be delayed, or be replaced by a continuing resolution, and a project list inside that bill would share the fate of a measure that members could set aside with limited immediate consequence. An omnibus that combined most or all of the remaining bills could not be set aside with the same ease, because setting the omnibus aside meant setting aside funding for the full range of agencies inside the package at a point close to, or after, a funding deadline. By fiscal 2022, consolidation was the regular method of finish. The fiscal 2022 act itself was counted at 2,741 pages at introduction, and the fiscal 2021 act that preceded the return had been counted by the Senate Historical Office at 5,593 pages, described as the longest bill ever passed by Congress at that point in the record. A project list placed inside a text of that size and scope moved with the text. Removal of a single project after assembly would have required reopening a negotiated package, and the record of package practice shows why reopening was resisted. Packages were negotiated by the appropriations leadership and party leaders rather than amended on open floors, amendment opportunities shrank once a package was assembled, and conference reports had largely disappeared as packaging replaced conferencing, with formal conferences falling from 38 in the 106th Congress to 9 in the 110th Congress in the count carried in the series record.

The presidential decision at the end of the process reinforced the same structure. The president faced one signature decision for the whole package, with no partial veto available. The Line Item Veto Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998, and no mechanism allowed a president to sign an omnibus and strike a single project line from the enacted text. A president who objected to a project, or to a set of projects, faced a choice between signing the package that contained the projects and vetoing the package that funded the government. The fiscal 2018 record illustrated the asymmetry in public form, when the president who signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal 2018 on March 23, 2018, a day after House passage, said publicly that the president would never sign another bill like that bill. The signature still occurred, because the alternative was a veto of the full funding measure. A designated project inside a package benefited from that asymmetry without any separate protection of its own.

Two documented positions on the restored practice were stated in the debate over the return, and the record presents both positions without a resolution between them. The first position held that disclosed projects reconnected members to the spending that members voted on. Under that argument, a member who requested a project, posted the request in public, certified the absence of a financial interest, and voted for a bill that contained the project had a direct and traceable connection to a specific use of funds that a formula allocation or an agency competition did not provide. The connection, in that argument, improved accountability, because a voter, a reporter, or a colleague could trace a dollar in the act to the member who had asked for the dollar to be spent in that place. The same position held that designated projects could ease passage of the whole. A member who had a disclosed project inside a large package had a concrete reason, visible to the district or state, to support a package that also contained thousands of other provisions that the member had not selected. In a process where a package needed a majority in the House and passage in the Senate on a text assembled by leaders, that concrete reason could contribute to the margin that carried the package.

The second position held that designated projects distributed benefits by access rather than by formula or by competition. Under that argument, a project entered the list because a member asked for the project and a committee accepted the request, and access to that process depended on the member position, the member relationship with the committee, and the ability of a local sponsor to bring a proposal to a member office in a form the office could submit. A formula, in that argument, distributed funds by a rule that applied to every jurisdiction that met the rule, whether or not the jurisdiction had effective access to a member request process. A competition distributed funds by criteria that an agency applied to applications, whether or not an applicant had a member sponsor. Designation, in that argument, produced a map of projects that reflected the geography of requests and committee acceptance as much as the geography of need measured by a single rule.

Neither position was endorsed in the fiscal 2022 design itself, and the design contained elements that each position could cite. Public posting, the ten request cap, the certification, the bar on for profit recipients, and the one percent aggregate cap supplied the disclosure and limit structure that the first position treated as the difference between the restored practice and the practice before 2011. The method of selection, a member request resolved by a committee and carried in a leadership assembled package with limited floor amendment, supplied the access structure that the second position treated as the defining feature of designation. The fiscal 2022 enactment held both elements in a single act. Nearly 5,000 projects, totaling more than 9.6 billion dollars by the Bipartisan Policy Center count of the committee lists, became law inside Public Law 117-103 on March 15, 2022, inside a 1.5 trillion dollar omnibus that had moved from release to signature in six days, after four continuing resolutions had carried the fiscal year to the middle of March. The projects lived in that package because the package was the vehicle that had to pass, and the debate over whether the projects strengthened the package or distorted the allocation inside the package continued on the terms that the two positions had set.

Studying the Package

A packaged act resists the reading habits that suit a single bill. The enrolled text runs to thousands of pages in the largest examples, its parts were negotiated as separate measures before they were joined, and the reasons for many of its provisions sit outside the text altogether. A sound method therefore begins with structure. The reader works from the act’s divisions back to the subcommittee bills that supplied them, treating each division as the descendant of a distinct appropriations bill with its own jurisdiction, its own allocation, and its own set of bargains. That backward path restores the units in which the package was actually built, and it keeps a provision that governed one agency from being misread as a judgment about the whole.

The second step is to read the explanatory statements as the record of the bargain. As formal conference reports fell away, the joint explanatory statement printed in the Congressional Record became the document in which the negotiators set out what the act was understood to do, and the Congressional Research Service describes those statements as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act. Courts and agencies work from the statutory text together with those statements, although the Government Accountability Office’s Red Book treats explanatory statement language as non-binding unless the act incorporates it by reference, a distinction a careful reader keeps in view when weighing what a direction in a statement can compel.

The third step is separation before judgment. A single act can contain expiring appropriations that last one fiscal year, limitation riders that restrict the use of funds without changing permanent law, and provisions that amend permanent law outright, as the ownership cap sentence in the fiscal 2004 act did. Conclusions drawn about the package hold only after those three kinds of provision are separated, since each rests on a different legal footing and each expires, or fails to expire, on a different schedule. A reader building a durable record of that work can keep your statute notes, citations, and case chronologies together free on VaultBook as a working habit. The government material behind the package rewards parallel drilling as well, and a reader can practice and revise US government and civics material on ReportMedic alongside the series itself, which is gathered in the United States legislation study guide.

The package, studied this way, is neither a corruption of the appropriations process nor a triumph of practical government; it is the documented method by which Congress repeatedly finished work it could not finish bill by bill, at a price in openness and deliberation that the record also documents.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why does Congress pass an omnibus bill?

Congress passes an omnibus bill when the regular appropriations process has not finished its work by the time funding must be enacted. Since fiscal year 1977, the Congressional Research Service counts only four fiscal years, 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997, in which all of the regular appropriations acts were enacted by the start of the fiscal year. In every other cycle, unfinished bills remained when the deadline arrived. Combining those bills into one measure lets leadership negotiate the remaining disputes in a single bargain, present both chambers with one vote, and deliver one text for the president to sign, rather than running each stalled bill through its own conference and floor fight against an expired deadline.

Q: What is a rider on an omnibus bill?

A rider is a provision carried on a spending bill that does work beyond supplying money for the period the bill covers. Riders take two main forms. A limitation rider restricts the use of the funds the bill provides, commonly in the form that none of the funds made available may be used for a stated purpose. A legislative rider changes permanent law, directing an agency to act or amending a statute outright. Both forms travel on appropriations vehicles because those vehicles must pass. A rider’s sponsor gains the certainty of the spending bill’s movement, and the rider inherits the bill’s deadline pressure, which is why provisions that could not pass as free-standing bills are so often drafted as riders.

Q: Are riders allowed on an omnibus bill?

The formal rules of both chambers say that legislation does not belong on a general appropriation bill, and the practice of both chambers accommodates riders anyway. House Rule XXI, clause 2 bars provisions that change existing law in a reported appropriation bill, subject to exceptions, and Senate Rule XVI bars amendments that propose general legislation. Those points of order are routinely waived: the House waives them through special rules reported by the Rules Committee, and in the Senate they fail or are never raised. Limitation riders survive most easily because a provision that merely limits the use of funds, without changing existing law, is in order under the House rule as written.

Q: Which long standing riders ride an omnibus bill every year?

The riders that return in each cycle are mostly funding limitations renewed in successive appropriations acts. The Hyde limitation on abortion funding was first enacted in 1976 and has been carried in the annual act for the departments concerned, with exceptions that have varied across versions. The Dickey restriction on firearms research funding dates from 1996 and was extended to a second research agency in 2011. The Tiahrt restrictions on disclosure of firearms trace data date from 2003. The state program rider barring the use of Justice Department funds against state medical marijuana programs dates from 2014. The deferred action funding prohibitions are not on the list, because the House adopted them and they were never enacted.

Q: What is a continuing resolution versus an omnibus bill?

A continuing resolution and an omnibus bill answer the same deadline in opposite ways. A continuing resolution continues the previous year’s funding at the previous year’s rates and under the previous year’s conditions for a limited period, buying time without making the current year’s decisions. An omnibus bill makes the decisions: it enacts new appropriations for the bills it combines, at levels and on terms negotiated for the current year. A cycle often contains both in sequence, with continuing resolutions carrying the government week by week until the omnibus is ready, as happened four times in the fiscal 2022 cycle before the consolidated act was signed on March 15, 2022.

Q: Why did regular order collapse into the omnibus bill?

Regular order collapsed into the omnibus bill because the deadline structure and the workload outgrew the process designed for them. Twelve appropriations bills must clear subcommittees, committees, both floors, and conferences, and the Congressional Research Service records only four on-time completions since fiscal year 1977. Disputes that stall one bill cannot be settled while the others wait, because the stalled bill’s funding expires with the rest. Packaging concentrates the unfinished business into one negotiation among the appropriations leadership and the party leaders, where trades across bills become possible and one vote settles the whole. The omnibus is therefore less a replacement for regular order than the standing method for finishing what regular order leaves undone.

Q: Are earmarks back in the omnibus bill?

At the vantage of April 2022, yes, in a redesigned form. A moratorium on earmarks had been in force since 2011 under chamber rules and leadership policy. For fiscal year 2022 the House restored the practice as Community Project Funding, with requests posted publicly before action, a cap of ten requests per member, certification that the member held no financial interest in the project, no eligibility for for-profit recipients, and a ceiling of one percent of discretionary spending across all projects. The Senate operated a parallel system as Congressionally Directed Spending. The first enactments came in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, signed on March 15, 2022. The Bipartisan Policy Center, compiling the committee lists, counted nearly five thousand projects worth more than 9.6 billion dollars.

Q: Does an omnibus bill leave any record of intent?

It leaves a thinner record than a bill passed under regular order. There are usually no committee reports for the combined text and no conference report, because most packages are never conferenced. The place of those documents is taken by explanatory statements, division-by-division accounts of the agreement printed in the Congressional Record in connection with the act. The Congressional Research Service describes the explanatory statement as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act it accompanies, and agencies and courts consult it when the enacted text is ambiguous. The Government Accountability Office treats language found only in such a statement as non-binding, however, unless the act incorporates it by reference, so the record persuades more readily than it binds.

Q: What does the word consolidated mean in the title of a spending act?

Consolidated is the formal label most modern packages carry in their titles, as in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021. It describes the same practice that the word omnibus describes: several regular appropriations bills, together with any other matter the negotiators attach, combined into a single measure that passes both chambers as one text and reaches the president as one bill. The choice between the two words is a matter of drafting convention rather than legal effect. Earlier practice used other titles for the same operation, including omnibus itself, as in the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 1997. Nothing in the operation changes with the label.

Q: What is a minibus, and how does it differ from an omnibus?

A minibus is a package of a few regular appropriations bills rather than most or all of them. The device lets Congress enact the bills that are ready while the contested remainder continues to be negotiated or runs on a continuing resolution. The fiscal year 2019 cycle is the standard example: five bills were enacted before the fiscal year began in two minibuses, one carrying three bills as Public Law 115-244 and one carrying two as Public Law 115-245, while the remaining seven bills were finished months later in a consolidated act. A minibus differs from an omnibus in scope, in the size of the bargain it can hold, and in the leverage it creates, since a partial package leaves the rest of the government still exposed to the deadline.

Q: Who negotiates the contents of an omnibus bill?

The contents are negotiated principally by the leadership of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees together with the party leaders of both chambers, a group conventionally described as the four corners. Subcommittees supply draft bills, hearings, and much of the underlying text, and committee staff assemble the combined measure, but the disputed items that prevented the regular bills from passing are settled at the leadership level. That concentration is what distinguishes the package from the process it replaces. Under regular order, contested provisions are resolved in markup and on the floor, member by member and amendment by amendment. In a package, they are resolved in a negotiation whose participants can trade across all twelve bills at once.

Q: Can a president veto only the parts of an omnibus bill that he objects to?

No. The president must accept or reject the bill as a whole. The Line Item Veto Act of 1996 attempted to give the president authority to cancel individual items in enacted bills, including items of spending, but the Supreme Court held the statute unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998, on the ground that cancellation after enactment amounted to amendment of a law outside the process the Constitution prescribes. For an omnibus bill the consequence is structural. A president confronted with thousands of pages containing both funding the government requires and provisions he has publicly criticized faces one decision, and the history of the device includes repeated signings accompanied by statements of objection.

Q: How much time did members have to review the fiscal twenty twenty-two act?

Very little, measured against the size of the text. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 was released in the early hours of March 9, 2022, and the House passed it on the same day. The Senate passed it on March 10, and it was signed into law on March 15. The measure ran to 2,741 pages as counted at introduction. Review in such a cycle rests on the months of committee work and negotiation that precede release, on the explanatory statements and summaries the committees publish, and on staff work concentrated on the divisions each office follows. The interval between a finished text becoming available and the vote on it, however, was a matter of hours in the chamber that acted first.

Q: Why does limitation wording survive the rules against legislating on a spending bill?

Limitation wording survives because it is drafted to stay on the spending side of the line the rules draw. House Rule XXI, clause 2 bars provisions that change existing law in a general appropriation bill, but a limitation that merely restricts the use of the funds the bill provides, without changing existing law, is in order. The standard form, that none of the funds made available by the act may be used for a named purpose, attaches to the money and to nothing else. It amends no statute and imposes no duty beyond the fence it builds around the appropriation. Drafted in that form, a provision can govern agency conduct for the life of the act while presenting itself, for purposes of the rule, as a condition on spending rather than as legislation.

Q: What is an explanatory statement, and what weight does it carry?

An explanatory statement is the document printed in the Congressional Record in connection with a packaged appropriations act that explains, division by division, what the agreement contains and how the conferees or negotiators intend the funds to be used. It performs the office that a conference report performs for a conferenced bill. The Congressional Research Service describes it as generally considered the authoritative statement of congressional intent for the act it accompanies, and agencies treat its directions as the practical instructions of the appropriations committees. Its legal weight is narrower than its practical weight. The Government Accountability Office holds that language appearing only in an explanatory statement does not bind as law unless the act itself incorporates the statement by reference.

Q: Can the Senate amend an omnibus bill the way it amends other bills?

In practice, rarely. An omnibus bill usually reaches the Senate as a negotiated product whose balance depends on no part being reopened, and it is typically considered under arrangements that limit debate and discourage amendment. A successful amendment would return the measure to the House with the funding deadline still running, and would invite the other chamber to reopen its own settled items. Senators retain the formal rights the rules give them, including the right to raise points of order under Rule XVI against legislative matter, but those points of order are frequently waived or never raised. The effective choice presented to the Senate is the choice the device is designed to present: approval of the package as assembled, or rejection of the whole.

Q: How does an omnibus bill differ from a reconciliation bill?

The two devices package legislation for different reasons and under different rules. An omnibus appropriations bill combines annual spending bills so that the government is funded in one enactment, and it moves under the ordinary procedures of both chambers, including exposure to the Senate filibuster. A reconciliation bill is a product of the budget process created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It carries instructions directing committees to change spending, revenue, or debt law by stated amounts, and it is protected in the Senate by limits on debate that prevent a filibuster. Reconciliation packages substantive law to meet budget targets. An omnibus packages appropriations to meet the fiscal year. The similarity is the scale of the vehicle; nearly everything else about their origins and constraints differs.

Q: Why do presidents sign omnibus bills they have criticized?

Because the alternative the device presents is a veto of the entire funding of the government. A president who objects to particular provisions in a consolidated act cannot cancel them individually, as the Supreme Court confirmed in Clinton v. City of New York. The choice is signature or a lapse in appropriations for every bill the package contains. Presidents have repeatedly chosen signature accompanied by a public statement recording their objections. At the signing of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 on March 23, 2018, the president stated that he would never sign another bill like it, objecting to a measure of 2,232 pages moved at speed, and signed it. The statement is part of the bargaining record for the next cycle; the signature is the law.

Q: What happens to the parts of government an omnibus leaves out?

They are funded by continuing resolution, left to a later package, or left unfunded. A package need not contain all twelve regular bills, and cycles regularly split the workload. In the fiscal 2015 cycle, eleven bills were enacted in the December package while the Department of Homeland Security was carried on a continuing resolution into the following February, during a dispute over immigration riders. In the fiscal 2019 cycle, five bills were enacted in minibuses before the fiscal year and the remaining seven were finished in a later consolidated act after a funding lapse of thirty-five days. What a package omits therefore keeps moving under prior-year terms, and the omitted bills retain their own deadlines, their own disputes, and their own capacity to produce a shutdown of the agencies they cover.

Q: What does incorporation by reference mean in a spending act?

Incorporation by reference is a drafting technique by which an act gives legal effect to a text that is not printed within the act itself, by identifying that text and declaring it enacted. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2000, signed on November 29, 1999, used the technique at unusual scale, incorporating several remaining measures by reference to texts printed in the Congressional Record rather than setting out their full language in the act. The device let the package be assembled and passed without reprinting every constituent bill inside the act’s own pages. It also complicates the reader’s task afterward, since the law in force must be recovered partly from a source outside the statute book, and it is one of the points at which the packaging of appropriations strains the ordinary forms of publication.