Every year, Congress is supposed to pass twelve appropriations bills. These are the laws that actually fund the federal government. Each bill covers one slice of the government, from Defense to Transportation-HUD, and each is written twice: the House drafts its own version and the Senate drafts its own, with different bill numbers and different text. The two versions eventually have to be reconciled into one law.
Here is the path each bill travels, and what each stage on the tracker means.
Before Congress acts: the budget request
The process formally begins when the President submits a budget request, a detailed proposal for what every agency should get. It matters as a statement of priorities, but it is a suggestion, not a law. Congress routinely ignores parts of it, funds things the President didn't ask for, and cuts things he did. That's why the Approps tracker doesn't count the request as progress: a bill with no congressional action reads "Not started," no matter what the President has proposed.
1. Subcommittee markup
The real work starts in the twelve appropriations subcommittees. There is one per bill, in each chamber. The subcommittee writes its bill against its 302(b) allocation (the spending ceiling assigned to each subcommittee out of the year's overall total), then holds a markup, a working session where members amend the draft line by line and vote to send it up to the full committee.
2. Full committee markup
The full Appropriations Committee (about 60 members in the House, 29 in the Senate) takes up the subcommittee's bill, considers more amendments, and votes to report it to the floor. A bill reported by full committee comes with a committee report. That is the detailed document explaining the bill, and it includes the tables that disclose earmarks.
3. The floor
The full chamber debates the bill, considers amendments, and votes. Passing the House takes a simple majority. The Senate is harder. Most appropriations bills effectively need 60 votes to end debate, which is why Senate floor time is the choke point most years, and why bills sometimes get bundled together into packages to save time.
4. Conference
The House version and the Senate version are never identical, so the chambers have to reconcile them. Sometimes that is a formal conference committee. More often in recent years it is a negotiation between the two Appropriations Committees that produces a single agreed text. This is also the stage where separate bills often get merged into an omnibus, one bill carrying many, or a minibus, a smaller bundle.
5. Final passage
Both chambers vote on the identical, reconciled text. Once the House and Senate have each passed the same words, the bill goes to the President.
6. Signed into law
The President signs the bill and the money is appropriated. Only then is that slice of the government funded for the fiscal year.
When the process runs late
The fiscal year starts October 1. If some bills are not law by then, Congress passes a continuing resolution, a stopgap that keeps agencies running at existing levels for a set period. If neither full-year bills nor a CR are in place, funding lapses and affected agencies shut down. The countdown clock on the Approps home page tracks exactly this deadline.
The tracker shows each bill's furthest verified stage in each chamber, confirmed against primary congressional sources. When a chamber has not acted, it says so plainly: Not started.