Congress Returns for Lame-Duck Session With December 11 Shutdown Deadline and Leadership Fights Ahead

Congress came back to Washington on Monday, November 9, 2026, for a session unlike any the Capitol has seen in years: a lame-duck sitting in which the party that still holds both chambers has just lost them both, the government is funded only until December 11, and the calendar leaves almost no room for error. Six days after voters handed Democrats control of the House and the Senate in the November 3 midterm elections, lawmakers returned to a building where the old majority still gavels the sessions but the new majority is already measuring the furniture, and where every decision taken in the next few weeks will be judged twice — once for what it does now, and once for what it hands to the Congress that takes over on January 3, 2027. The immediate task is the simplest to state and the hardest to finish: keep the federal government open past December 11, when the stopgap law that has carried agencies since October expires. Behind that single deadline sits a crowded agenda of unfinished spending bills, a leadership contest in the House, a farm bill that has already expired, a debt limit that could be reached within months, the annual defence policy bill and a threatened impeachment vote against Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. Few lame-duck sessions have carried so much, and few have had so little time in which to carry it, and the Congress lame-duck session December 11 shutdown deadline November 2026 is the story that will dominate Washington until Christmas.

1. Congress Comes Back to a Clock That Is Already Running

The 119th Congress returned on Monday for what is expected to be a session of roughly four to six weeks, running until Christmas with a break for Thanksgiving, and it did so under conditions that strip away almost all of the usual room for delay. The House met at noon on Monday, with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m., according to the schedule published by the majority leader, and the Senate returned in parallel, so that both chambers were back at work on the same day for the first time since the midterm campaign pulled lawmakers away from the Capitol. What makes this return different from an ordinary post-election sitting is the result that sent them home: on November 3, voters handed Democrats control of both the House and the Senate, flipping several Republican-held seats in what reporting has described as a sweeping setback for President Donald Trump, and the transfer of power is set for January 3, 2027, when the new Congress is sworn in. Until that day, however, Republicans keep the gavel in both chambers, Speaker Mike Johnson remains Speaker and sets the House agenda, and the outgoing majority must govern a country that has just voted to replace it.

That split — power held by one party, a mandate claimed by the other — shapes everything about the session, because it means the lame duck is not a caretaker exercise but a negotiation conducted in public between a majority that is leaving and a majority that is arriving. The Democrats who will take control in January have every reason to want the hardest choices deferred until they hold the gavels, and the Republicans who still hold them have every reason to want the hardest choices settled while they still can. In between sit the deadlines that neither side can move: funding runs out on December 11, the farm bill has already expired, and the annual defence bill is supposed to be finished by the end of the year. The session will therefore be judged not only by what it passes but by what it chooses to leave behind, and the first week will show which of those two instincts — settle now, or wait for January — is winning.

1.1 A Six-Week Session After a Sweeping Midterm

A lame-duck session is any meeting of Congress held after an election and before the newly elected members take office, and the 2026 edition is a long one by recent standards, expected to last roughly four to six weeks with a Thanksgiving break in the middle. The length matters because it is deceptive: six weeks sounds generous until it is measured against the work on the table, and against a House calendar that, between Monday and the December 11 funding deadline, leaves only sixteen days in session. The published House calendar shows those days falling in four blocks — November 9 through 12, November 17 through 20, November 30 through December 3, and December 8 through 11 — with four more session days, December 14 through 17, scheduled after the funding is due to lapse. In other words, the House has barely three working weeks to do the work of a full session, and the Senate, which sets its own calendar, faces the same compressed arithmetic.

The midterm result that produced this session was decisive enough that its consequences are already being felt inside both parties before a single vote has been cast. President Trump acknowledged after the election that his immigration policy had been, in his words, too tough, and said he was ready to work with the Democratic Party in the years ahead — a signal that the White House understands the balance of power has shifted even though the formal transfer is still weeks away. Democrats, meanwhile, arrive in Washington with a mandate they have not yet been given the power to exercise, and their leaders have spent the days since the election weighing how much to demand now and how much to hold for January, when they will control the floor. That calculation will be visible in every negotiation of the session, starting with the first and most urgent: the money.

1.2 Sixteen Days to Do the Work

Sixteen House session days between November 9 and December 11 is a strikingly small number for the volume of business Congress has left undone, and it explains why so much of the lame-duck conversation is about what can realistically be finished and what must be pushed into the new year. A full-year appropriations bill, negotiated line by line across twelve subcommittees, is the kind of work that normally takes months; a stopgap extension, by contrast, can be passed in days, and the difference between those two options is the central choice of the session. An unnamed House Republican told Fox News to expect a stopgap running into February or March, a sign that at least some in the outgoing majority already regard a full-year deal as out of reach in the time available. The alternative — a year-end omnibus assembled under deadline pressure, with the Democratic majority already measuring the furniture — is the easiest vehicle in American politics for spending and policy riders that could never survive a standalone vote, and it is the option fiscal conservatives in the outgoing majority are most likely to resist.

The calendar also fixes the rhythm of the session in a way that leaves little room for recovery if anything slips. The House sits for four days this week, four days next week, then breaks for Thanksgiving, then returns for four days at the end of November and four days in the second week of December, and the funding deadline falls on the last of those days. Any single week lost to a leadership fight, an impeachment vote or a standoff over defence spending would eat a quarter of the time available before the money runs out. That is why the first days of the session matter so much: the leadership elections, the committee meetings and the first floor votes will show whether Congress intends to use its sixteen days or spend them, and the answer will decide whether December 11 passes quietly or becomes the next shutdown.

2. The December 11 Deadline, and What Happens If It Passes

The deadline that governs everything else in the lame-duck session is December 11, 2026, the day the stopgap law that keeps federal agencies open expires, and it is a deadline Congress created for itself in September, when it chose a temporary fix over a finished budget. The current stopgap, H.R. 6500, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027, became law on September 2, and it funds agencies at fiscal 2026 levels until December 11 or until full-year spending bills replace it. The House agreed to the Senate’s version on September 1 by a vote of 370 to 48, with large majorities of both parties in favour, according to PoliData’s summary of the roll call — a reminder that, only two months ago, both parties were willing to buy time rather than fight over the full budget. That time has now almost run out, and the same choice presents itself again: pass full-year appropriations, pass another stopgap, or let the funding lapse and watch parts of the government close.

To avoid a lapse, both chambers must pass either full-year appropriations or another stopgap, and President Trump must sign it, by December 11. The White House supported the current stopgap, and the administration has also pressed Congress to finish the Pentagon’s budget, so the outline of a deal exists in principle; the difficulty is in the details, and in the politics of a session in which the outgoing majority and the incoming majority disagree about almost everything the money should buy. If no measure passes in time, a shutdown would begin, and the country would find itself reliving an experience it has only just escaped: the longest shutdown in American history, which ran 43 days and ended a year ago this month, is covered in explainers about what closes and who gets paid, and it is the memory every negotiator in the room carries into this session.

2.1 What the Stopgap Covers — and What It Does Not

The stopgap does more than keep agencies open, and its expiry on December 11 therefore threatens more than the ordinary business of government. The same law extends, to December 11, federal highway and transit programmes that were due to expire on September 30, with Highway Trust Fund spending authority running to December 12, so a lapse would also interrupt the programmes that pay for roads and public transport. The law also carries to December 11 the Defense Production Act, the authority Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked to order the restart of Sable Offshore’s pipeline in Santa Barbara County, a dispute now before the Ninth Circuit, and the National Flood Insurance Program, which protects homeowners in flood-prone areas and cannot write new policies once its authority lapses. Each of these extensions was written to expire on the same day as the funding, so that December 11 is not one deadline but a bundle of them, and any deal that extends the funding must also decide what to do with each of the authorities riding along with it.

What the stopgap does not do is almost as important as what it does. Because it funds agencies at fiscal 2026 levels, it freezes spending at last year’s figures and blocks new programmes, new contracts and new priorities from starting, and it carries all the restrictions that come with a stopgap — no new starts, no reprogramming, no room for the administration to shift money between accounts. For a government that has spent the year arguing about defence, immigration and energy, that freeze is itself a policy choice, and it is one reason the debate over whether to pass another short-term extension or a full-year omnibus is so sharp. A short extension protects the leverage that fiscal conservatives still hold, because flat funding is the easiest way to hold spending down; a full-year deal, negotiated in the three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, would let both parties write their priorities into law while they still can. The choice between those two paths is the first real decision of the lame duck, and it will be taken in the open, under the pressure of a clock that stops on December 11.

2.2 The Shutdown the Country Saw a Year Ago

The last time the federal government ran out of money, the shutdown lasted 43 days, the longest in American history, and it ended only a year ago this month, so the consequences of a lapse are not a matter of speculation for anyone in Washington. Federal workers went without pay, national parks closed, food assistance and small-business lending were disrupted, air travel was snarled by staffing shortages, and the economic cost mounted day by day until a deal was finally struck. The memory of that shutdown hangs over the lame-duck session in two opposite ways: it is a warning to both parties that voters punish the side blamed for a closure, and it is also a piece of leverage, because each side knows the other would rather avoid being blamed for a second shutdown in two years. The result is a negotiation in which both parties publicly insist they will not be responsible for a lapse, while privately calculating how much of their agenda they can extract in exchange for the votes to prevent one.

That calculation is complicated by the midterm result, because the party that would be blamed for a shutdown in December is the party that still holds the gavels, and the party that would benefit from a clean extension is the party that takes power in January. Republicans, who control both chambers until January 3, have the votes to pass a stopgap on their own if they can hold their caucus together, but they also have the most to lose if the government closes on their watch. Democrats, who will inherit whatever Congress leaves behind, have an interest in a short extension that lets them write the full-year bills themselves, and an interest in avoiding a shutdown that would greet their first weeks in power with a crisis. The tension between those interests is the real negotiation of the lame duck, and it will play out in the sixteen session days before December 11, with the 43-day shutdown of a year ago as the cautionary tale both sides cite and neither side wants to repeat.

3. The Spending Bills That Are Not Done

Behind the December 11 deadline sits a larger failure: Congress did not finish its regular budget work before the fiscal year began on October 1, and it has not finished it since. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that tracks federal spending, the House has passed three of the twelve annual spending bills for fiscal 2027, and the Senate has passed none. That is the work the stopgap was meant to buy time for, and the time it bought is nearly gone. The twelve bills cover every part of the federal government, from defence and homeland security to health, education, agriculture and foreign aid, and each one is a negotiation in its own right, with its own constituencies, its own riders and its own opponents. Passing all twelve in sixteen session days is not realistic; passing a handful, or bundling them into an omnibus, or passing another stopgap that pushes the whole question into the new year, are the options on the table, and each carries a different political price.

The scale of the unfinished work is what makes the lame-duck session so consequential, because the bills Congress leaves undone in December will be written by a different Congress in January, under a different majority, with different priorities. The outgoing Republican majority has spent the year pressing for a record defence budget and for spending restraint elsewhere; the incoming Democratic majority has signalled that it wants to revisit those choices, including the defence number, and to fund the domestic programmes it campaigned on. A full-year deal struck now would lock in the outgoing majority’s preferences for the rest of the fiscal year; a short stopgap would hand the pen to the incoming majority. That is why the debate over the spending bills is not really a technical argument about appropriations, but a political argument about who gets to decide what the government spends, and the answer will be written into whichever measure passes before December 11.

3.1 Three of Twelve in the House, None in the Senate

The arithmetic of the appropriations process is stark: of the twelve annual spending bills that fund the government for fiscal 2027, the House has passed three and the Senate has passed none, and no regular fiscal 2027 appropriations bill has been enacted into law. The House’s three bills represent a quarter of the work; the Senate’s zero represents a process that never got moving, stalled by the same disagreements that have defined the year — over defence, over immigration enforcement, over the size of the domestic budget — and by a calendar that gave the Senate little time to take up bills the House had not yet sent it. The result is that the government is running entirely on the stopgap, at last year’s spending levels, under all the restrictions that come with a stopgap, and it will keep running that way until Congress either finishes the bills or passes another extension.

The next deadline inside the stopgap falls on November 20, when the Office of Management and Budget must send the appropriations committees a list of rescissions that continue under the law — a technical requirement that will nevertheless force the administration to put its spending choices on paper in the middle of the lame-duck session, and that will give both parties a fresh set of numbers to argue over. Beyond that date, the practical question is whether the two chambers can agree on even a subset of the twelve bills in the time available, or whether the session will end with another stopgap and the full-year work deferred to the 120th Congress. A short-term extension into February or March, which at least one House Republican has already predicted to Fox News, would keep the government open while handing the appropriations pen to the incoming Democratic majority; a year-end omnibus, negotiated in the weeks after Thanksgiving, would let the outgoing majority write the final numbers. Both options are live, and the choice between them is the session’s central spending decision.

3.2 The Defense Number at the Centre of the Fight

The main dispute in the spending fight is defence: the Trump administration wants a record $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, a figure that Senate Democrats have rejected, and the gap between those two positions is the largest single obstacle to a full-year deal. The administration has pressed Congress to finish the Pentagon’s budget, and the White House’s support for the current stopgap was given on the understanding that defence would be addressed in the lame duck, but the size of the number — $1.5 trillion, a record — has made it a proxy for the broader argument about the direction of American power, the war in Ukraine, the confrontation with Iran and the military build-up in Asia. Democrats, who will control the Senate’s appropriations process from January, have no reason to accept the administration’s number now, when they can negotiate it themselves in a few weeks; Republicans, who still hold the gavels, have no reason to surrender the number without extracting something in return.

The defence dispute also explains why the annual defence policy bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, is caught up in the same end-of-year tangle as the spending bills. The House passed the defence authorisation in July, but it stalled at a Senate procedural vote, and it now faces the same year-end deadline as everything else in the lame duck. The two bills — the authorisation that sets defence policy and the appropriation that pays for it — are supposed to move together, and when one stalls the other stalls with it. If the lame duck ends without either, the incoming Congress will inherit both, and the defence debate that the Trump administration wanted settled this year will instead be settled next year, by a Democratic majority that has already said it will not accept a $1.5 trillion figure without a fight. That is the stakes of the sixteen days: not just whether the government stays open, but who writes the defence budget, and at what number.

4. Leadership Races in a Chamber About to Change Hands

While the funding deadline dominates the calendar, the House is also holding the leadership elections that will decide who leads each party in the chamber that takes over in January, and those elections are the most immediate evidence of how the midterm result has rearranged Washington. House Republicans hold their leadership elections on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, with Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representative Jim Jordan competing for minority leader after Speaker Mike Johnson said he would not seek the post. The contest is not a formality: the minority leader will be the public face of the Republican opposition for the next two years, the person who negotiates with the new Democratic Speaker, and the person who sets the party’s strategy for winning the House back in 2028. Scalise, the current majority leader, brings the institutional weight of the leadership and the relationships built over years in the top jobs; Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and one of the most recognisable figures in the party’s conservative wing, brings the energy of the base and a record of confrontation with Democratic administrations.

The election matters beyond the personalities because it will signal what kind of opposition the Republicans intend to be. A Scalise victory would suggest a party that wants to fight the Democrats on legislation, using the minority’s procedural tools to shape bills and force votes; a Jordan victory would suggest a party that wants to fight them in public, using hearings, investigations and the media to define the terms of the debate. Both men have supporters who argue their approach is the only one that works against a Democratic majority, and both have critics who say the other’s approach has already been tried and failed. The vote on Tuesday will settle the question for now, but the argument behind it — about how a party that has just lost power should behave — will run through the whole of the lame-duck session and beyond it, and it will shape every negotiation in which the outgoing majority has to decide whether to cooperate with the incoming one or to obstruct it.

4.1 Scalise Against Jordan for Minority Leader

The contest between Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan for the post of House minority leader is the most watched leadership race of the lame-duck session, because it pits two different theories of opposition against each other in a party that has just lost an election and is arguing about why. Scalise, as majority leader, has been at the centre of the House’s legislative work, counting votes, scheduling floor time and negotiating with the Senate and the White House, and his supporters present him as the steady hand who knows how the institution works and can use its rules to protect Republican priorities even in the minority. Jordan, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has been at the centre of the party’s most public fights, leading investigations, staging confrontations and building a national profile that extends far beyond his committee, and his supporters present him as the fighter who will not let the Democrats govern unchallenged and who will keep the party’s base engaged for the long road back to a majority.

The choice will be made by the Republican conference on Tuesday, in a secret ballot that will also reveal, in the margin of victory, how united or divided the party is after its midterm defeat. A narrow win for either man would leave the loser’s supporters nursing a grievance that could surface in every close vote of the lame duck, when the outgoing majority needs its members to hold together to pass a funding bill. A decisive win would give the victor a mandate to lead, but it would also fix the party’s direction for the next two years at a moment when many Republicans are still arguing about what went wrong on November 3. Either way, the leadership election is not a sideshow to the lame-duck session: it is the session’s first real vote, and its result will colour every negotiation that follows, because the person who wins it will be the person the Democrats have to deal with from January onward.

4.2 A Speaker Who Is Staying Put — For Now

Speaker Mike Johnson, who remains Speaker and sets the House agenda until the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, has said he will not seek the post of minority leader, a decision that clears the way for the Scalise–Jordan contest and that also defines his own role in the lame duck. Johnson’s task for the next few weeks is to manage a session in which he holds the gavel but not the future: he must bring a funding bill to the floor, keep his conference together through the leadership election, and hand over a House that is functioning rather than one that is in chaos. It is a caretaker role, but it is not a passive one, because the Speaker decides what comes to the floor and when, and in a session with sixteen days and a December 11 deadline, the schedule is the substance. If Johnson moves quickly on a stopgap, the session will be about the terms of the extension; if he waits, the session will be about the brink.

Johnson’s decision not to seek the minority leadership also tells its own story about the mood inside the Republican conference. The Speaker who led the party into the midterm defeat is stepping aside from the contest to lead it in opposition, and that has been read in Washington both as an act of responsibility — clearing the field so the party can choose its next leader cleanly — and as a recognition that the conference wants a fresh start. What Johnson does in the lame duck will nevertheless shape how he is remembered: a Speaker who kept the government open and handed over an orderly House will leave with his reputation intact, while a Speaker who presided over a shutdown in his final weeks would leave under a cloud. The sixteen days before December 11 are, in that sense, Johnson’s last test as Speaker, and the whole of Washington will be watching how he uses them.

5. The Hegseth Impeachment Push

Competing for the same floor time as the funding bill is a Democratic push to impeach Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, a confrontation that would be the most dramatic event of the lame-duck session if it reaches a vote. Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has said he will force a House vote on impeaching Hegseth, and CNBC reported that the Defence Secretary faces a vote on articles of impeachment as Congress returns, although the report did not specify the chamber in which the vote would take place. House Democrats are expected to discuss the resolution on Tuesday, and a floor vote could follow quickly, which would put the impeachment question at the very start of the session, alongside the leadership elections and the first funding negotiations. The push is, by the accounts of those reporting it, a Democratic initiative that has found an unlikely procedural ally in Massie, whose willingness to force a vote gives the resolution a route to the floor that it might not otherwise have had.

The impeachment effort matters for the lame duck not only because of what it would mean for Hegseth, but because of what it would do to the session’s already compressed calendar. A floor vote on impeachment, with the debate and the procedural manoeuvring that would surround it, would consume days that the funding negotiation cannot spare, and it would harden the partisan atmosphere in which the funding negotiation has to take place. That is why the timing of the vote is itself a strategic question: Democrats who want the vote want it now, while the outgoing Republican majority is still in place and while the midterm mandate is fresh; Republicans who want to protect Hegseth want it deferred, or defeated, or buried in procedure. The resolution’s fate will be decided in the first week of the session, and its outcome will tell Washington a great deal about whether the lame duck is going to be a session of negotiation or a session of confrontation.

5.1 What Massie Has Said He Will Force

Thomas Massie, the Republican representative from Kentucky, has said he will force a House vote on impeaching Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, and that commitment is what has turned a Democratic talking point into a live procedural question. Massie is one of the House’s most independent-minded Republicans, a member who has repeatedly broken with his own party’s leadership on spending, surveillance and foreign policy, and his willingness to force the vote reflects a longer-running scepticism about the Pentagon’s leadership and about the administration’s handling of defence policy. By pledging to force the vote, Massie has given the impeachment resolution a sponsor who cannot be dismissed as a partisan Democrat, and he has created a situation in which the House leadership cannot simply refuse to schedule it: a privileged resolution, forced by a member, must be dealt with, and the dealing with it will take floor time that the leadership would rather spend on the funding bill.

What Massie has not done, at least in the reporting so far, is to explain in detail what articles of impeachment he expects the House to vote on, or what evidence he believes supports them, and that gap is part of why the push is being watched so carefully. An impeachment vote is the most serious step the House can take against an executive-branch official, and the articles that frame it define the charges, the evidence and the standard the Senate would eventually have to judge. If the articles are narrow and specific, the vote will be a focused argument about Hegseth’s conduct; if they are broad and political, the vote will be a referendum on the administration’s defence policy as a whole. The resolution’s text, when it is published and discussed on Tuesday, will answer that question, and the answer will decide whether the impeachment push is a genuine attempt to remove a Cabinet secretary or a symbolic confrontation designed to set the terms of the opposition for the next two years.

5.2 Why Democrats Are Weighing the Timing

House Democrats are expected to discuss the impeachment resolution on Tuesday, and the discussion will be as much about timing as about substance, because the decision to force a vote now, in a lame-duck session, carries risks as well as opportunities. The opportunity is obvious: the Democrats have just won the midterms, the public mood is with them, and a vote to impeach a controversial Defence Secretary would demonstrate that the incoming majority intends to hold the administration to account. The risk is equally obvious: an impeachment vote that fails, or that is seen as a partisan exercise, would hand the outgoing Republican majority a victory in its final weeks, and it would consume the floor time that the funding negotiation needs. Democrats must also weigh what an impeachment push in December would mean for January, when they will control the House and could pursue the same charges with a majority behind them and a full session ahead of them.

That calculation explains why the Democratic discussion on Tuesday matters so much, and why the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. Some Democrats will argue that the midterm mandate demands action now, while the voters’ verdict is fresh and while the administration is at its weakest; others will argue that the mandate is better served by a clean funding deal and a fresh start in January, when impeachment, if it is pursued at all, can be pursued properly. The decision will reveal how the incoming majority intends to govern: as a party that uses its first weeks to settle scores, or as a party that uses them to govern. Either way, the impeachment question will not disappear after Tuesday — it will either be voted on, or deferred, and the deferral would itself be a decision, one that the lame-duck session will be judged by.

6. The Farm Bill, the Debt Limit and the Rest of the Pile

Beyond the funding deadline and the leadership races, the lame-duck session carries a pile of unfinished business that has been accumulating all year, and the two items at the top of that pile — the farm bill and the debt limit — are each capable of producing a crisis of their own if Congress leaves them undone. The farm bill expired on September 30, and if Congress does not act by December 31, farm programmes revert to permanent law from the 1930s and 1940s, a set of Depression-era statutes that would impose price supports and acreage controls that no one in modern agriculture wants and that would disrupt commodity markets overnight. The debt ceiling, meanwhile, is currently set at $41.1 trillion, raised by $5 trillion in the 2025 reconciliation law, and it will likely be reached within about six months, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, after which the Treasury would begin using extraordinary measures to keep paying the government’s bills. Both items are the kind of business that Congress normally settles in the ordinary course of a session; both are now sitting in a lame duck that has sixteen days to do everything.

The pile also includes the farm bill’s companion issues — a transportation package, a bipartisan tax deal, permitting reform — and the annual defence policy bill, each of which has its own supporters, its own opponents and its own deadline. Other unfinished business includes the farm bill, a transportation package, a bipartisan tax deal, permitting reform and the annual defence policy bill, and the question for the lame duck is not whether all of it can be finished — it cannot — but which of it will be finished, which of it will be extended, and which of it will be left for the 120th Congress. That triage is the quiet work of the session, done in committee rooms and leadership offices rather than on the floor, and it will determine what the new Congress inherits in January: a clean slate, or a stack of expiring authorities and looming deadlines.

6.1 A Farm Bill Past Its Expiry Date

The farm bill expired on September 30, after multiple extensions, and the year-end deadline cited by analysts is December 31, the date on which farm programmes would revert to permanent law from the 1930s and 1940s if Congress does not act. That reversion — known in Washington as the “dairy cliff” and its companions — would impose price supports calculated on 1940s formulas, disrupt the commodity programmes that farmers plan around, and create chaos in the markets for milk, wheat, corn and cotton. It is a prospect that no one in either party wants, and it is also a prospect that has been threatened so often, and averted so often, that it has lost some of its power to frighten. The farm bill has been extended repeatedly, and the most likely outcome of the lame duck is another extension, carrying the current programmes into the new year while the 120th Congress writes a full five-year bill.

An extension, however, is not a solution, and the farm bill’s long expiry is itself a symptom of the deeper problem the lame duck faces: Congress has not been able to finish its regular work, and it has been governing by extension for years. The farm bill covers not only crop supports and conservation but also nutrition assistance, rural development and agricultural research, and each of those titles has its own constituency and its own fight. The nutrition title, which funds food assistance, is the largest and the most contested; the commodity title, which sets the safety net for farmers, is the most technically complex; and the conservation title, which pays farmers to protect soil and water, is the most popular with the public. Reconciling those interests takes time, and the lame duck does not have it, so the farm bill will almost certainly be extended rather than finished — one more item handed to the new Congress, and one more reason the session will be judged by what it leaves behind as much as by what it passes.

6.2 A Debt Ceiling That Could Bite in February

The debt ceiling is currently set at $41.1 trillion, raised by $5 trillion in the 2025 reconciliation law, and it will likely be reached within about six months, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, after which the Treasury would begin using extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills. Some analysts put the date even sooner, with the limit possibly reached as soon as February 2027, which would put the debt-ceiling fight squarely in the first weeks of the new Congress, when the Democrats who have just taken power would have to decide whether to raise the ceiling themselves or to demand concessions in exchange. The lame duck is the last chance for the outgoing Republican majority to deal with the debt limit on its own terms, and the question of whether to act before losing control is under discussion as Republicans weigh acting now or leaving the problem for their successors.

The debt limit is the most dangerous item on the lame-duck agenda, because it is the one that, if mishandled, can do the most damage the fastest. A failure to raise the ceiling, once the Treasury’s extraordinary measures are exhausted, would mean the United States defaulting on its obligations for the first time in its history, with consequences for interest rates, for the dollar and for the global financial system that economists have spent years warning about. No one in Congress wants a default, and the history of debt-limit fights is a history of last-minute deals, but the politics of the lame duck make a deal harder than usual: the outgoing majority has little incentive to raise the ceiling for a successor it has just lost to, and the incoming majority has little incentive to vote for a raise before it takes power. The most likely outcome is that the lame duck leaves the debt limit untouched, and the fight is deferred to February, when the new Congress will have to face it in its first weeks — an inheritance that will define the opening of the 120th Congress before it has even begun.

7. The Defense Bill and the Iran Question

The annual defence policy bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, is one of the items the lame duck is supposed to finish by the end of the year, and its fate is tied to the same disputes that have stalled the spending bills. The House passed the defence authorisation in July, but it stalled at a Senate procedural vote, and it now sits in the pile of unfinished business that the session must triage. The NDAA is the bill that sets defence policy for the year — pay for the troops, weapons programmes, the posture in Europe and Asia, the rules for the Pentagon’s operations — and it has been passed every year for more than six decades, a record that both parties are proud of and that neither wants to break. The bill’s stall in the Senate is therefore not a routine delay but a sign of how deep the disagreements over defence have become, and the lame duck is the last chance to get it moving before the new Congress has to start the process again.

The defence bill’s connection to the Iran question is what makes it the sharpest edge of the lame-duck session. ABC30 Fresno reported that disputes over funding for the war in Iran could come to a head as the year-end deadline approaches, and the G7 foreign ministers who met in Paris on Monday were pressing Washington on restraint over Iran even as the lame duck opened. The United States has been engaged in a confrontation with Iran that has already shaped the year’s politics, and the question of how much the war in Iran should cost, and who should authorise the spending, is the kind of question that a lame-duck Congress, with its outgoing majority and its incoming mandate, is poorly placed to answer. The defence bill, the spending bills and the Iran question are therefore not three separate items on the agenda but one interlocking problem, and the way Congress handles them in the next few weeks will set the terms of the American posture towards Iran for the year ahead.

7.1 The Annual Pentagon Bill, Stuck in the Senate

The National Defense Authorization Act passed the House in July, and it has been stuck ever since, stalled at a Senate procedural vote that has not been revisited. The stall is not a matter of neglect: the NDAA is the most important defence bill Congress passes each year, and its text runs to thousands of pages, covering everything from military pay raises to the authorisation of new weapons systems, from the rules governing the Pentagon’s acquisition process to the policy for the wars the United States is fighting and the alliances it is maintaining. The Senate’s procedural vote failed because the two parties could not agree on which amendments would be allowed, and which issues — including the war in Iran, the defence budget’s size, and the Pentagon’s leadership — would be debated on the floor. That disagreement has not gone away in the months since, and the lame duck will have to resolve it, or leave the bill for the new Congress, in the same compressed calendar as everything else.

The NDAA’s year-end deadline is not a legal requirement but a political one: the bill is supposed to be finished by the end of the year so that the Pentagon can plan its programmes for the next fiscal year, and a failure to pass it would leave the military operating under last year’s authorisations, with new programmes delayed and old ones extended by inertia. That is the same logic that governs the spending bills, and it is why the NDAA and the appropriations bills are so often negotiated together, in the same end-of-year package, by the same leaders, under the same deadline pressure. If the lame duck produces an omnibus that includes both the defence authorisation and the spending bills, it will be because the leaders decided that the only way to finish either was to finish both; if it produces a stopgap, the NDAA will likely be extended with it, or left for January. Either way, the Senate’s procedural stall in July will be the starting point for the negotiation, and the question of which amendments are allowed will be the first thing the negotiators have to settle.

7.2 Iran Funding and the Lame Duck’s Sharpest Edge

Disputes over funding for the war in Iran could come to a head as the year-end deadline approaches, according to reporting from ABC30 Fresno, and the warning captures the way the Iran question cuts across every other item on the lame-duck agenda. The confrontation with Iran has been the defining foreign-policy issue of the autumn, and the G7 foreign ministers who opened two days of talks in Paris on Monday put Iran at the top of their agenda alongside Ukraine, pressing Washington on restraint and on a fair settlement. The United States is also due to take part in US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi on November 10 and 11, with the special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner attending, and France set to participate, according to the French foreign minister — talks that will be under way even as Congress debates the funding that pays for the confrontation. The coincidence of those talks with the opening of the lame duck is not an accident of the calendar: it is the reason the funding debate matters, because the money Congress appropriates in December will decide what the United States can do in the Gulf in the months that follow.

The Iran funding dispute is also the issue on which the lame duck’s split personality — an outgoing majority and an incoming mandate — is most visible. The Trump administration has pressed for a record defence budget that includes the resources for the Iran confrontation, and Senate Democrats have rejected the $1.5 trillion figure in part because of what it would fund. The Democrats who take power in January will have their own view of the Iran policy, and they have no reason to authorise, in December, spending that they would rather debate in January. The result is a standoff in which the funding for the war is both the most urgent item on the agenda and the hardest to settle, and in which any deal on the spending bills will have to include an understanding, explicit or implicit, about Iran. That understanding, whatever it turns out to be, will be the lame duck’s most consequential decision, and it will be judged not in Washington but in the Gulf, where the consequences of getting it wrong are measured in lives.

8. What to Watch Next

The lame-duck session will be decided in the next few weeks, and the decisions will come in a sequence that is already visible in the calendar. The first test is Tuesday, November 10, when the House Republicans hold their leadership elections and the Democrats discuss the Hegseth impeachment resolution — two events that will show, on the same day, how the outgoing majority intends to organise itself in opposition and how the incoming majority intends to use its first weeks. The second test is November 20, when the Office of Management and Budget must send the appropriations committees its list of rescissions, a technical deadline that will force the administration to put its spending choices on paper and give both parties a fresh set of numbers to argue over. The third test is the Thanksgiving break, after which Congress returns for the final push to December 11, and the fourth is December 11 itself, when the funding runs out and the session either produces a deal or produces a shutdown. Each of those dates is a decision point, and each will narrow the options for the ones that follow.

What to watch, in the end, is not only the votes but the negotiations that happen between them, because the lame duck will be settled in the rooms where the leaders meet, not on the floor where the members vote. The funding negotiation, the defence negotiation, the farm bill extension and the debt-limit decision are all being handled by a small group of people — the Speaker, the majority leader, the minority leaders, the appropriations chairmen and the White House — and the public statements from those people will be the best guide to where the session is heading. If they start talking about a stopgap into February or March, the session is heading for an extension; if they start talking about an omnibus, it is heading for a deal; if they stop talking, it is heading for a crisis. The coming weeks will provide the answers.

8.1 The Dates That Decide the Session

The dates that will decide the lame-duck session are already fixed, and they leave almost no margin for error. Tuesday, November 10 brings the House Republican leadership elections, with Scalise and Jordan competing for minority leader, and the Democratic discussion of the Hegseth impeachment resolution, with a floor vote possible soon after. November 20 brings the Office of Management and Budget’s rescissions list, the next formal step in the appropriations process. The Thanksgiving break follows, and then Congress returns on November 30 for the final stretch: four days at the end of November, four days in the second week of December, and the funding deadline on December 11. After that, four more session days are scheduled, December 14 through 17, but those fall after the money has run out, and they would be days spent managing a shutdown rather than preventing one.

Each of those dates matters because it closes off an option. After the leadership elections, the Republican conference will have a leader, and the direction of the opposition will be set. After the OMB list, the spending numbers will be on the table, and the negotiation will have to engage with them. After Thanksgiving, the session will be in its final phase, and the choice between a stopgap and an omnibus will have to be made. And on December 11, the choice will be made for Congress, by the calendar, if it has not been made by then. The session’s sixteen days are not a resource to be spent at leisure; they are a countdown, and every day that passes without a funding deal brings the deadline closer and the options narrower. That is why the first week matters so much, and why the votes on Tuesday will be watched as closely as any vote of the year.

8.2 The Choices That Will Define the Handover

The choices Congress makes in the lame-duck session will define the handover to the 120th Congress, and they will do so in ways that last long after January 3, 2027. A full-year spending deal would lock in the outgoing majority’s priorities for the rest of the fiscal year; a short stopgap would hand the pen to the incoming majority and let it write the budget it campaigned on. A farm bill extension would defer the hardest agricultural decisions to a new Congress that has not yet formed its committees; a debt-limit decision, or the lack of one, would set the first crisis of the new Congress for February. An NDAA passed in December would settle defence policy for the year; an NDAA left for January would reopen every argument about the Pentagon’s budget, the war in Iran and the size of the military. And an impeachment vote, taken or deferred, would set the tone of the relationship between the new Democratic House and the Trump administration for the next two years.

Those choices are the real work of the lame duck, and they are choices that cannot be avoided by doing nothing, because doing nothing is itself a choice — the choice to let the funding lapse, to let the farm bill revert, to let the debt limit approach, to let the defence bill stall. Congress came back to Washington on Monday with sixteen days and a crowded agenda, and the session will be judged by how it used them. The coming weeks will provide the answers.

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