Omnibus Bills

Congress is supposed to pass 12 separate appropriations bills each year, one for each subcommittee, but it rarely finishes them all on time. Instead it often combines several or all of them into one omnibus appropriations act, a practice first tried in 1950 and common since the 1980s. Packages of a few spending bills are informally called minibuses. Omnibus bills are also used for other purposes, such as large reconciliation, tax, or authorization packages that bundle many policy changes together.

Omnibus spending bills are usually negotiated by a small group of leaders and appropriators near a deadline, often in December, and can run thousands of pages. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of December 29, 2022, for example, totaled about 4,000 pages and $1.7 trillion and also carried unrelated measures, including a revision of the Electoral Count Act. Because they must pass to keep the government open, omnibus bills attract riders and other provisions that could not pass on their own. When Congress cannot agree even on an omnibus, it relies on continuing resolutions that extend existing funding, sometimes for a full year, as it did for fiscal 2025.

Members of both parties criticize omnibus bills because they are released with little time to read them and are voted on as a single take-it-or-leave-it package, and some members have pledged to vote against any omnibus. Defenders say packaging bills is often the only way to reach bipartisan agreement and avoid shutdowns, especially in the Senate, where each bill can face a filibuster. In the fall of 2025 a lapse in appropriations led to a shutdown that ended in November with a stopgap measure combined with a small package of full-year bills. The remaining fiscal 2026 bills were enacted in packages between January and April 2026. Supporters see omnibus bills as a practical necessity, while critics see them as a symptom of a broken budget process.