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The deadline to fund the government is September 30th. The Senate is primed to take action this week to push the funding conversation to December, avoiding any potential funding fight or shutdown until after the November elections. That may be the last thing Congress does before adjourning for the annual August recess, but there are still lots of things happening in Washington including more court battles over election procedure, an unusual amount of rule-making, and developments in the war with Iran. As always, transparently showing where the news comes from.

Congress is moving to fund the government past this November's election, and it isn't a done deal yet.

The House passed its own stopgap, H.R. 9770, on July 21, funding the government at current levels through December 4. The Senate is voting on a different version Monday: it struck the text of an unrelated, already-passed bill, H.R. 6500, and substituted its own text, released August 2 by Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, running a week longer, through December 11, and blocking a contested White House budget office rule on federal grant reviews.

Neither version is law yet. The House isn't back until August 31, for five days before it recesses again, and won't be in the same city as the Senate again until September 14. Whatever the Senate passes still needs the House's sign-off.

The OMB rule block, the win Collins highlighted in her own statement, is only in the Senate's text. It isn't in the House's version, one more difference the two chambers still have to resolve before either bill reaches the president.

This fiscal year alone already saw three separate funding lapses, and nothing about Monday's vote fixes what causes them. It just pushes the next deadline past your ballot.

The full breakdown, what the source actually says, who's for it and against it, and what happens next, is in Deep Reason: Senate Moves to Push Government Funding Past the Election.

What's Loud: Trump said in a Truth Social post Saturday that he's canceling a planned strike on Iran to pursue a deal opening the Strait of Hormuz and ending Iran's nuclear program, and that talks resume Monday. Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency dismissed the claim as "a new lie," maintaining Iran's nuclear program is peaceful and citing unnamed military officials for its denial.

What's Missing: Monday's Federal Register carried 12 final rules, 9 proposed rules, and 92 notices, more in one day than most weeks see in total. They included new administrative requirements for domestic-violence shelters that get federal funding, a new pesticide-residue limit on imported black pepper, and Treasury's disparate-impact rescission.

What Matters: The Trump administration has filed 29 emergency applications with the Supreme Court since January 2025, per Ballotpedia's running tracker, versus 19 filed during all four years under Biden. The same emergency-docket move sits behind Monday's election-order case: getting contested policy into effect before a case is fully litigated.

The White House has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis and let two pieces of a Trump executive order take effect before the midterms. The order would have the Department of Homeland Security sharing states' citizen lists for voter-roll reviews, and the Postal Service writing new rules for mail-ballot envelopes. The Solicitor General argues these are just internal directives, not final agency actions yet, so no one has actually been harmed and the courts ruled too early, pointing to a prior case where the Court rejected a similar pre-implementation challenge. A federal district court in Massachusetts already blocked both provisions and the 1st Circuit agreed, and the emergency application asks the Supreme Court to overrule both directly, warning that waiting for a normal appeal would make the provisions impossible to use before November. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson set a Monday 4 p.m. deadline for a response, and it matters because a ruling either way will shape what tools any administration can use to influence how states run elections, with the midterms three months out.

The Office of Personnel Management finalized a rewrite of how federal layoffs work. The new rule replaces the seniority system used for decades (last hired, first let go) with a point system based on performance, up to 7 points for top ratings, folding veterans' preference into that point total instead of protecting it as its own category. OPM says the change lets agencies keep their best-rated employees during a downsizing instead of losing them simply because they were hired more recently. It matters because the next time an agency shrinks, whether a 20-year employee keeps their job over someone hired last year now depends on a performance rating set by their own agency, not tenure alone.

The State Department made permanent a visa-bond program that started as a pilot. The rule requires visitor-visa applicants from countries with high visa-overstay rates to post refundable bonds of $10,000 to $20,000 before traveling here. State says the bonds target countries with measurably high overstay rates and are fully refunded to travelers who leave on time. It matters because it turns a temporary test into a standing barrier: a family visiting from one of the listed countries now has to front five figures just to get in the door.

3,248 new wireless spectrum licenses are up for auction under the Federal Communications Commission's newly proposed rules for the upper C-band, part of the federal push for next-generation 5G buildout.

Aug. 4-25: Virginia, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, and Washington vote Aug. 4; Tennessee votes Aug. 6; Hawaii votes Aug. 8; Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin vote Aug. 11; Alaska, Florida, and Wyoming vote Aug. 18; and Oklahoma holds a runoff Aug. 25, including Virginia's open Senate seat and Michigan's open governor's race.

Aug. 10: The Senate's own recess begins, a month-long window with no floor votes until Sept. 11.

Aug. 15: A four-year tariff-rate quota on imported quartz countertops takes effect under a proclamation signed in July.

Aug. 18: California's 14th District decides its special election runoff.

Aug. 25: Georgia's 13th District holds its special election runoff.

Sept. 11: The Senate returns, the Judiciary Committee's next real chance to reschedule a vote on Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche after Sen. Thom Tillis told Axios he won't be confirmed.

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