The calendar year of 2020 is quickly ending, but Congress hasn’t finished its work on the Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) budget, which technically started back on October 1st. Our last update back in November was about the Senate publicly releasing their budget bills, with an eye to wrapping up the process on December 11th (AKA: today). Unfortunately, not much has happened since November.

Congressional leaders are now trying to buy themselves another week to work, pushing a continuing resolution (CR) until next Friday, December 18th. Both the House and Senate have approved the measure and the President should sign it shortly.

While that CR is for all purposes taken care of, it’s increasingly unclear which will happen first: a final FY21 budget is approved into law or the end of the current session of Congress (which ends on January 3rd). If Congress can’t get things together, then they will need to punt the decision into the next calendar year and the new 117th Congress. If that comes to pass, the expectation is another, longer CR, which will go to a date in March 2021. This all assumes a normally functioning Executive Branch, which is not a given.

Things are still very fluid, we’ll update things when we know more, so please keep checking back.