Every few months, a familiar headline returns to Washington: Congress has passed a stopgap bill to keep the government funded past a deadline. For most federal agencies that is a budget footnote. For the Pentagon, it can mean a warship's nuclear propulsion work sits on hold, a munitions order cannot go out, or a training exercise gets canceled outright. Here is what a continuing resolution actually does to a defense program, and why the mechanism keeps tripping up the same kinds of projects year after year.
Acquisition term, glossed once: a continuing resolution (CR) is a temporary funding law Congress passes when it has not finished the regular appropriations bills before a fiscal year begins on October 1. It generally holds agencies to the prior year's funding levels and terms until a full-year budget, or another CR, takes effect.
What is a continuing resolution, and why does the Pentagon keep landing under one?
A CR is Congress's way of avoiding a funding lapse without finishing its actual budget work. It extends the previous fiscal year's spending levels and program terms for a set window, buying lawmakers more time to negotiate the twelve annual appropriations bills — including the defense bill that funds procurement, research, and operations accounts.
This has become closer to the norm than the exception. A Government Accountability Office review found the Department of Defense has operated under a continuing resolution in all but 12 of the last 49 fiscal years — meaning stopgap funding, not a finished budget, has been the department's starting condition in roughly three out of every four years reviewed that GAO audit examined (SRC-01). The pattern repeated in 2026: House Republicans moved a stopgap measure in July to carry funding past the September 30 fiscal year-end through December 4, after the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill stalled in the Senate, according to USNI News reporting (SRC-03).
Why can't the Pentagon start new programs under a CR?
A CR does not just cap funding at last year's total — it locks in last year's program list. Agencies are generally barred from beginning what acquisition officials call a "new start" (a program or production effort that had no funding line in the prior year) and from ramping up procurement quantities beyond what was already funded, even if the pending budget request assumes a bigger order.
That restriction is deliberate: Congress has not yet approved the new activity, so the CR treats it as un-funded until it does. For a program on a fixed schedule, the effect is a scheduling collision between the calendar and the appropriations process. GAO's review of 74 acquisition programs found roughly half reported schedule effects tied to CR-driven funding gaps, including delayed contract awards for hardware kits on the F-15's Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System modification in fiscal 2022 (SRC-02).
What is a funding "anomaly," and how does a program get one?
Programs are not entirely without recourse. The White House budget office can ask Congress to write a "funding anomaly" into a CR — a specific, named exception that lets one program exceed the prior year's funding level, start new work, or begin advance procurement despite the general freeze. Each anomaly has to be requested and justified individually; there is no blanket waiver.
The summer 2026 stopgap fight showed the anomaly process in action. The Office of Management and Budget asked for up to $1 billion in advance procurement authority so the Navy could begin nuclear propulsion work on its planned Trump-class battleship, a program the Pentagon has projected at roughly $17.5 billion in total cost. OMB also sought authority for the Navy to award long-lead-time material contracts for CVN-82, the fifth Ford-class aircraft carrier, which the budget currently plans to procure in fiscal 2029, arguing that delay would raise the ship's eventual cost. A third request covered continued orders of Standard Missile-3 interceptors, AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, and Tomahawk cruise missiles, citing cancellation penalties built into their multiyear procurement contracts, per USNI News (SRC-03). None of those programs can move on that funding without Congress writing the exception into the bill's text.
How much does operating under a CR actually cost, in dollars and time?
GAO's audit put dollar figures on what is usually described only in the abstract as "inefficiency." A facilities sustainment contract at Joint Base San Antonio was originally estimated at $579,000; by the time CR-related delays pushed the award into fiscal 2024, the quoted price had risen to $1,445,000. The Marine Corps' Amphibious Combat Vehicle program absorbed roughly $17.7 million in extra costs between fiscal 2022 and 2024, driven by CR-induced ordering delays that exposed the program to foreign exchange rate swings on components. On the readiness side, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported it lacked funding to ship training targets to the Philippines for the 2024 Balikatan exercise, forcing cancellations (SRC-02).
The administrative overhead compounds across a program's life. The F-35 program office told GAO that roughly 20 percent of its financial management staff's time goes toward replanning budgets each time a new CR takes effect — work that produces no additional aircraft or capability, just repeated adjustment to funding that keeps arriving in short-term increments (SRC-02).
| Program or activity | Reported CR-related impact | Fiscal year(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Joint Base San Antonio facilities contract | Cost rose from $579,000 to $1,445,000 after delayed award | FY2024 |
| Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicle | About $17.7 million in added cost from delayed ordering and exchange-rate exposure | FY2022–FY2024 |
| F-15 EPAWSS modification | Delayed award of hardware-kit contract | FY2022 |
| F-35 program office | About 20% of financial management staff time spent on CR replanning | Recurring |
What is Congress trying to solve when it debates a full-year CR instead?
When lawmakers cannot finish individual appropriations bills at all, they sometimes pass a "full-year continuing resolution" that extends prior-year funding for the entire fiscal year rather than a short bridge window. That avoids a shutdown, but it does not fix the new-start problem — it just extends it across twelve months instead of a few, unless Congress attaches its own list of anomalies to unlock specific programs. For fiscal 2027, that fight was still unresolved as of the December 4, 2026 deadline set in the stopgap bill, with the defense authorization measure — and the anomaly requests tied to it — still pending Senate action (SRC-03).
For a program office, the practical lesson is the same each cycle: a CR does not stop the money, but it does freeze the program list, and getting off that list takes a named request, not just a passed budget.
Frequently asked questions
Does a continuing resolution shut down the government?
No. A CR is what prevents a shutdown by extending funding when the regular appropriations bills are not finished. A shutdown happens only if no CR or full-year budget is in place when funding authority lapses.
Can a program get more money under a CR if its budget request asks for it?
Generally no, unless Congress writes a specific funding anomaly into the CR text authorizing that program to exceed the prior year's funding level or begin new work.
How common are continuing resolutions for the Pentagon?
Very common. GAO found DOD operated under a CR in all but 12 of the last 49 fiscal years (SRC-01).
For a related defense news perspective, read How Multiyear Procurement Works: Five Program Years, Six Findings, One Cancellation Bill.
For more context, read Department of State Releases 2024 Fiscal Transparency Report.