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Aug 3, 2025  |  
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Michael Gold


NextImg:Senate Passes Its First Spending Bills, but Battles Lie Ahead

The Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed the first of its spending bills for the coming year, with bipartisan approval of measures to fund military construction projects, veterans and agriculture programs and legislative branch agencies.

But the broad agreement over the $506 billion package of bills, typically the least controversial of the annual federal spending measures, masked a bitter fight in Congress over how to fund the government past a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.

Senators pushed through the legislation after several intense days of haggling as part of an agreement to allow the chamber to make progress on funding the government before senators leave Washington for a monthlong summer recess.

“We are on the verge of an accomplishment that we have not done since 2018 — and that is pass appropriation bills across the Senate floor prior to the August recess,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said on the floor.

Still, debate over the package hinted at the bigger spending challenges that lie ahead.

Democrats, furious about the White House’s efforts to subvert Congress’s power in the purse, are wary of striking spending deals with Republicans when President Trump and his team have signaled they intend to continue ignoring or defying lawmakers’ spending dictates, even those enacted into law. And Republicans are fighting among themselves over how closely to hew to the Trump administration’s spending targets.

The package approved on Friday night would provide $452 billion for veterans programs, $300 billion of it mandatory spending to fund veterans benefits; $19.8 billion for military construction and family housing projects; $27.1 billion for agricultural programs; and $7.1 billion for the operations of Congress and legislative agencies.


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