With a government shutdown looming, U.S. lawmakers passed another short-term spending bill on 14 March to keep the government open through September 2025.
Unable to pass a regular appropriations bill through the House and Senate before the deadline, Congress passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open in September 2024. That stopgap measure avoided a government shutdown for three months, pushing back any budget decisions until after the 2024 election. In December, lawmakers again voted to push back budget negotiations, passing another continuing resolution to keep the government open through 14 March.
With that deadline fast approaching, the House passed a Republican-authored continuing resolution along partisan lines. A day before the 14 March deadline, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that he would vote for the bill, providing political cover for other Senate Democrats to vote to keep the government open despite their concerns with the legislations.
"While the Republican bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Schumer said. "It is deeply partisan. It doesn't address far too many of this country's needs, but I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power in a government shutdown is a far worse option."
Schumer added that the chaos of a government shutdown could give Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) more freedom to cut jobs and programs.
On 14 March, hours before funding was set to expire, the Republican-controlled Senate passed the legislation with limited Democrat support.
President Donald Trump signed the bill Saturday, 15 March, according to a White House announcement.
"I appreciate Senator Schumer, and I think he did the right thing. Really, I'm very impressed by that," Trump said.
The decision to keep the government open through continuing resolutions instead of the regular appropriations process means that budget decisions on agencies like NOAA will be kicked down the road.
During the fiscal year 2025 appropriations process, competing House and Senate legislation laid out alternative futures for NOAA. While the Senate bill would have fully funded the NOAA Fisheries’ budget request, House Republicans pushed for a 22 percent cut.
While the continuing resolution doesn’t include that drastic cut, a fact sheet shared by Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee claims the Republican stopgap spending measure would give the Trump administration “broad discretion to eliminate individual programs of the Economic Development Administration and NOAA.
"This includes individual NOAA programs impacting coastal and Great Lakes areas, as well as funding for climate change research and for improvements in the forecasting of severe weather," the fact sheet said.
The Trump administration has already moved to slash NOAA’s workforce, laying off hundreds of staffers in February. The administration is reportedly preparing to lay off another 1,000 NOAA employees and is moving to sell off some NOAA facilities.
The Trump administration has not released its budget requests for fiscal year 2026.
