We're nearly at the halfway point of the year, which means for lawmakers in Washington, D.C., the guessing game is well underway as to whether or not Congress will finish appropriations work before the next federal fiscal year begins on October 1. If it’s any indicator, the FY 2022 funding bill was not signed into law until March 15, 2022, nearly six months after the start of the fiscal year. But that’s not the only harbinger of what may lie ahead. In the last 45 years under the current federal budget appropriations process, Congress has managed to finish this work on time only four times. However, for this edition of the Federal Update, we will not get too bogged down on what some argue is a broken process. Instead, we’ll provide a quick review of what the process should look like, some highlights of the current request from the Biden administration, and what the prognosis is.

• Publication date: June 2022
• Author: Michael Belarmino