The Appropriations Committees

The Constitution says no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law, and for most of the nineteenth century the House Ways and Means Committee wrote both the tax and the spending bills. The Civil War made that workload impossible. The House created a separate Appropriations Committee on March 2, 1865, and the Senate followed in 1867. Their power has waxed and waned since, but every federal dollar that is not mandatory spending still passes through them.

Each committee is divided into twelve subcommittees, one for each of the twelve regular appropriations bills, which together fund the government's discretionary spending, about 1.8 trillion dollars a year covering defense, agencies, and grant programs. The subcommittees mirror one another across the chambers, covering defense, military construction and veterans, labor and health and education, homeland security, energy and water, agriculture, and the rest. Their chairs are known on Capitol Hill as the cardinals. Mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare are not appropriated annually and lie outside the committees' control.

The fiscal year begins October 1, and the committees are supposed to have all twelve bills enacted by then. Congress has not done so on time since fiscal 1997. Instead it relies on continuing resolutions that extend the prior year's funding, or on omnibus bills that combine several or all of the twelve into a single package negotiated by leaders at the last minute. When neither passes, the government shuts down. Appropriators in both parties have long complained that this cycle takes the detailed work of their subcommittees and replaces it with leadership deals.

The committees remain the place where Congress most directly controls the executive branch, since money can be given with conditions, withheld, or directed to particular purposes. Earmarks, money directed to specific projects requested by members, were banned in 2011 and restored with new disclosure rules in 2021 as community project funding. In 2025 the committees found themselves in conflict with an administration that withheld or canceled funds they had approved, raising the question of what an appropriation means if the President need not spend it.