What Happens When Must-Pass Bills Aren't Must-Pass Anymore?

The Farm Bill and the surface transportation bill will hit the same wall on September 30, 2026, when current authorizations for entire departments expire. Neither is likely to be replaced by a comprehensive reauthorization before that date. And no one is surprised. We’re entering the fourth year of the Farm Bill extension, a massive bill that authorizes the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the surface transportation reauthorization, a bill to authorize the U.S. Department of Transportation, will also need an extension. 

These bills have always been hard to pass. They were largely seen as bipartisan behemoths that needed both parties to come to the table and compromise. Now, gridlock leads to years of inaction, and one-year authorizations are barely holding the cracks together within the departments, and the stakeholders who depend on them are feeling it.

It will be worth watching whether the lame duck session this year can finally deliver a Farm Bill after four years of extensions, and what forward-looking conversations around surface transportation look like in its wake. But it's also worth gaming out what happens to these massive bills if Congress simply can't come to an agreement at all.

One answer is already playing out in real time. Bills with strong bipartisan support, like the Fix Our Forests Act, could effectively replace the Forestry Title of the Farm Bill (with a few significant reauthorizing additions). FOFA passed the House by a wide bipartisan margin back in January 2025 and cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee last fall; it's now waiting on a full Senate floor vote. While it would leave behind plenty of congressional priorities that traditionally live in the Forestry Title, it covers most of the Forest Service. It’s unclear whether passage of this bill before a Farm Bill means that a forestry title is deprioritized, but it sets the stage for a bigger conversation about how big of a bill Congress can tackle. 

Surface transportation may be headed down a similar path. Safety provisions, freight and rail titles, or discrete programs with their own bipartisan champions are exactly the kind of pieces that could get peeled off and moved on their own if a full, funded five- or six-year bill can't clear the Highway Trust Fund's math in time.

So does Congress simply take smaller bites at the apple, moving the popular bipartisan pieces while leaving the more controversial programs behind? It doesn't bode well for an all-of-government approach to these bills. If so, it changes how these fights need to be worked on a title-by-title, coalition-by-coalition basis, rather than waiting on one big vote that may not come.