WASHINGTON — At least one of the Senate’s yet-to-be-unveiled fiscal 2026 appropriations bills could be released next week, even though lawmakers will be in their districts for the Thanksgiving recess.

There is a good chance the Senate will post its version of the Energy-Water bill, one of the four the Senate has not yet released, House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, R-Okla., said Friday.

The issue was discussed when the top four House and Senate appropriators met Thursday, Cole said. “I don’t know about the other three, but we raised a lot of questions about Energy and Water, since we’ve actually passed that one across the [House] floor,” he said.

Senate appropriators are aiming to release that bill and potentially more of the outstanding bills — Financial Services, Homeland Security and State-Foreign Operations — next week, a source familiar with the plan said. But that plan is not final, the source said.

House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said Friday that the lawmakers discussed the outstanding Senate bills and that Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the text could be posted early next week.

The Senate Appropriations Committee isn’t expected to hold formal markups on any of the remaining bills, a step that is typically bypassed when bipartisan support is lacking.

The Energy-Water bill is usually not one of the more contentious measures, but Senate Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Kennedy, R-La., has been pushing for a lower spending level for the bill than what could get reported out of the committee in a bipartisan fashion.

Full-committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., also serves as the ranking member on Kennedy’s subcommittee. Cole said he thinks both chambers could “work through” the Energy-Water funding levels and find common ground.

“So, we’d like to see it more in play than it is right now, since it hasn’t come out of [Senate] committee,” he said.

Cole has been eying Energy-Water for the next package of spending bills, and the Senate’s release of its bill could make that goal more possible.

Lawmakers are up against a Jan. 30 deadline to pass the nine remaining annual funding bills after a trio of appropriations bills — Agriculture, Legislative Branch and Military Construction-VA — were included in the stopgap spending package that ended the record-breaking government shutdown last week.

Any bills not done by the new Jan. 30 deadline should be covered by a full-year continuing resolution, Cole said earlier this week. Appropriators are trying to avoid that fate.

Competing plans

The Senate left town Thursday without any movement on a spending package that Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had hoped to get started before the Thanksgiving recess.

Senate Republicans have been navigating objections as they try to add some combination of the Commerce-Justice-Science , Interior-Environment, Labor-HHS-Education and Transportation-HUD bills to the Defense bill.

Cole favors a different approach than the Senate’s, instead pushing for appropriators to advance a smaller spending package that doesn’t include the Labor-HHS-Education and Defense appropriations bills in hopes of getting that done before Christmas.

House Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said he expects the Senate to send over that major package, and for the House to instead work on something smaller.

Simpson said that could be a bundle of the Commerce-Justice-Science, Interior-Environment and Transportation-HUD bills.

“The more bills you get in there, the more it looks like an omnibus . . . they’ll send over maybe five bills, and we’ll break it probably down to three and get those passed, hopefully before Christmas,” Simpson said.

Cole also said a bipartisan deal on overall spending limits wouldn’t be necessary to advance the smaller-scale approach he’s backing, because the lion’s share of spending is concentrated in the Labor-HHS-Education and Defense bills.

“If we got my approach, we can get something done and not spend a lot of time arguing about topline. We’ll have more time to discuss it,” Cole said. “And remember, we’re coming off a 43-day shutdown. Feelings are pretty raw around here right now, so this is probably not the best atmosphere to sit out and talk about some of these things, and the smaller ones make more sense.”

DeLauro said she does not object to moving forward without an official topline.

“I think if we’ve got nine more bills, and we got allocations, the topline will emerge,” DeLauro said. “We will get there.”

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