Congress is once again stuck in the budget process. In the absence of a budget, appropriations committees can proceed with their work, allocating spending authority based on estimates or previous years’ totals, after May 15. Programs that affect tribes, Alaska villages, Indian communities, families and individuals are spread across 10 of the 12 appropriations bills.

Congress is once again stuck in the budget process.

Here are the steps so far:

At the end of last year, Congress adopted a large “budget deal” that included spending authority for all discretionary programs. The bill also set the broad budget outlines for two years.

The Senate Budget Committee Chair, Senator Enzi, has implemented those broad budget outlines to set overall discretionary spending limits for Fiscal Year 2017, and limits for each of the 12 appropriations subcommittees. Now, the Senate Appropriations sub-committees can begin to write their 12 bills, and bring them to the full Appropriations Committee and to the Senate floor for approval.

Senator McConnell, the majority leader in the Senate, has said that he hopes to have all 12 appropriations bills approved by October 1, when the new fiscal year begins. In other words, regular order, on time.

The House, on the other hand, is in a very different situation. House Republicans cannot agree to abide by the deal that Congress approved last December. The problem seen by many fiscal conservatives is that the overall discretionary spending amount is $30 billion above what Congress agreed to back in 2011, in the Budget Control Act. In other words, Congress agreed to “bust the cap” in December’s mega budget deal.

The wrinkle in this problem is that House Republicans adhere to an informal party rule called “the Hastert rule,” named for a former Speaker of the House. Under the Hastert rule, no issue can come to the floor of the House unless a majority of Republicans support it. This rule allows the conservative wing of the Republican Party to hold up action on any bill that doesn’t meet their concerns, and it prevents most bi-partisan legislation from proceeding. Hence the difficulty in agreeing on an overall budget number.

So what happens now?

Congress does not have to adopt a budget. The budget itself is simply an outline of an intending spending plan – a note from Congress to itself. In the absence of a budget, appropriations committees can proceed with their work, allocating spending authority based on estimates or previous years’ totals, after May 15. Representative Hal Rogers, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, hopes to have final committee action on all appropriations bills by the end of June.

What does all this mean in Indian Country?

Programs that affect tribes, Alaska villages, Indian communities, families and individuals are spread across 10 of the 12 appropriations bills. Some major programs are funded through the Interior-Environment bill (BIA, BIE, forestry programs), the Labor-HHS bill (IHS, Indian Education programs), and the Agriculture bill (tribal colleges, Indian agriculture programs). For more information on the programs covered the bills, and the requests from Indian Country, see the FY2017 Budget Request from the National Congress of American Indians.