The Senate Appropriations Committee posts its schedule of hearings and markups on its official site, appropriations.senate.gov, and the committee's calendar is the single best signal of how the funding year is going. When the committee is marking up bills, the process is alive. When the calendar is quiet in late summer, a stopgap is coming.
How the Senate schedule works
The committee has twelve subcommittees, one per appropriations bill. In a textbook year, each subcommittee holds spring hearings on the President's request, marks up its bill in early summer, sends it to the full committee, and the Senate passes bills through the fall. In practice the Senate rarely follows the textbook: it often skips subcommittee markups entirely, takes bills straight to full committee, or packages several bills into a single vehicle on the floor late in the year.
Where to see it live
Approps tracks every posted hearing and markup, with dates, times, and links to the official notices, on the calendar. Each event names the bills it touches, and completed events roll off automatically. The results feed the tracker, where every Senate markup or floor vote moves that bill's row the same day.
Reading the calendar like a staffer
A few patterns repeat every year. Full committee markups listed with several bills at once mean the committee is batching to save floor time. A hearing on a supplemental request is separate from the annual bills and moves on its own track. And the days after a recess are when new markups get noticed: committees post schedules when members return, so the first week back tells you more than the six quiet weeks before it.
The deadline behind the schedule
Whatever the calendar says, the fiscal year ends September 30. If the twelve bills are not law by then, Congress needs a continuing resolution to avoid a lapse. Whether that risk is live right now is computed on the shutdown page.