Voters went to the polls on November 3. The Associated Press reported that Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, with a handful of races still uncalled, and that the new Congress is sworn in in January 2027.
For anyone with a federal application due in the next two months, the date that matters is earlier than that. Government funding runs out on December 11, and the Congress that has to deal with it is the one sitting right now. So the election changed who will write the fiscal 2028 bills. It did not change who has to finish fiscal 2027, or when.
Here is what is actually settled, what is not, and how to read a funding notice while the appropriations cycle is still open.
Where the FY2027 bills stand
None of the 12 regular fiscal 2027 appropriations bills has been enacted.
The government is running on a stopgap. On September 2, 2026, H.R. 6500 — the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027 — was signed into law as P.L. 119-103. Its Division A provides continuing appropriations for agencies funded through all 12 regular bills from October 1, 2026 through December 11, 2026, a 72-day period. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Division A provides about $1.701 trillion in annualized discretionary budget authority for the year. Congress must enact the regular bills or another stopgap before it expires to avoid a funding gap beginning December 12.
The bills themselves are unevenly along. As of the Congressional Research Service’s September 17 account, the House Appropriations Committee had reported all 12 and the full House had passed three. The Senate Appropriations Committee had reported none, and the Senate had considered none. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget described the same split on November 3: the House has passed 3 of 12, the Senate none.
That is nine bills that have never had a House floor vote and twelve that have never had a Senate one, with about five weeks of calendar left. We are not going to tell you how that resolves, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.
The calendar runs ahead of the new Congress
The useful thing to understand is the sequencing.
The members elected on November 3 take office in January, per AP. December 11 comes first. Whatever happens to fiscal 2027 funding — full-year bills, another stopgap, a gap — happens under the Congress already seated, in a lame-duck session, with some races still being counted.
Appropriations are also not the only thing stacked into those weeks. CRFB’s November 3 survey lists the surface transportation reauthorization, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Farm Bill, a Pell Grant shortfall and a possible debt-limit increase as candidates for an end-of-year package, and estimates the policies being floated at $200 billion to $265 billion on a temporary basis. For a grant seeker, the significance is not the total. It is that the appropriations bills setting fiscal 2027 program levels are competing for floor time with all of it.
What “FY2026 levels” means in a notice you are reading
Under the stopgap, most programs are funded at a rate for operations based largely on the amounts, authorities and conditions in the fiscal 2026 enacted appropriations. Practically: the money behind a federal notice open today is last year’s number, not a fiscal 2027 decision.
The stopgap also carries what appropriators call anomalies — provisions making exceptions to that general rule for specific accounts. The CRS summary of P.L. 119-103 lists them section by section, and the grant-relevant ones are worth knowing by name, because they are the programs Congress declined to leave on autopilot: WIC and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, Election Security Grants, the Disaster Relief Fund, a National Flood Insurance Program extension, Wildfire Management, the Indian Health Service, Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment Grants, Federal Highway Administration highway infrastructure programs, Choice Neighborhoods, Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, Homeless Assistance Grants, and Fair Housing Activities.
If your program is on that list, Congress has already looked at it once this fall. If it is not, it is riding the general rate.
Three different laws are paying for the notices open now
This is the part that gets lost when coverage treats “federal funding” as one thing. Sort the federal records open in the OpenGrants database by which law actually pays for them and you get three groups. The December 11 deadline reaches one of them.
Group one: annual appropriations that have not been enacted. These are the notices most exposed to what happens in December, and several are titled for a fiscal year whose appropriation does not exist yet.
EPA’s FY27 Guidelines for Brownfield Revolving Loan Fund Grants is open with an award ceiling of $1,000,000 and a deadline of January 21, 2027. CERCLA requires a 20% cost share, which the notice illustrates: a $1,000,000 award requires the recipient to provide $200,000. Its companion, FY27 Guidelines for Brownfield Cleanup Grants, carries a $500,000 ceiling, the same 20% cost share and the same January 21 deadline. Both are soliciting against fiscal 2027.
The Forest Service’s Landscape Scale Restoration Grant Program for Non-Federal Lands, due January 26, 2027, sets a $100,000 per-project minimum — $50,000 for the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands — with maximums of $300,000 for single-state projects and $600,000 for multi-state projects, and a 1:1 non-federal match. Every application except those from federally recognized Tribes and Tribal organizations needs a State Forester to sponsor it, and each State Forester may sponsor up to 10 in total: five single-state and five multi-state. Tribes and Tribal organizations are limited to two applications under this notice and have a separate national one.
HUD’s two open Fair Housing Initiatives Program notices sit directly on an anomaly. The Private Enforcement Initiative runs from $500,000 to $1,500,000 and the Education and Outreach Initiative from $175,000 to $2,500,000, both due January 1, 2027, and both records note HUD extending the deadline by an additional 60 days. FHIP is the program behind the stopgap’s Fair Housing Activities provision, and the notice itself describes a program Congress “has affirmed each year since then through appropriations” — which is exactly the dependency at issue in December.
Group two: money already enacted in some other law. These notices are open in the same window and are not waiting on December at all.
USDA’s Harvest to Hallways National School Lunch Program Equipment Assistance Grants makes $50 million available non-competitively to the 54 state agencies that administer the program, distributed proportionally using the fiscal 2026 Child Nutrition State Administrative Expense allocation formula, with the largest single state allocation shown as $6,200,306 and applications due January 11, 2027. The funding is made available under section 1001(b)(4) of the American Rescue Plan Act, P.L. 117-2 — a law from 2021. States then run competitive subgrants to local education agencies, school food authorities and schools for equipment valued over $1,000, and may keep up to 5% for administration.
USDA APHIS has two FY 2027 National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program notices open, both drawing on up to $40,000,000 provided through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the 2018 Farm Bill. The State Preparedness opportunity runs from $500,000 to $2,000,000; the Industry Preparedness opportunity runs from $500,000 to $4,000,000. Both close at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on January 7, 2027, both require submission through USDA’s ezFedGrants system along with a Unique Entity Identifier and an active SAM.gov account, and APHIS expects work to begin between July 1 and August 31, 2027.
Note what that start date means. An applicant writing this proposal in December is planning work that begins eight months later, on money a 2018 and a 2025 law already provided.
Group three: federal formula money moving through a state, under an authority that expires December 11 too. This group has two clocks, and most applicants only watch one.
The surface transportation provisions enacted in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expire on December 11, following a short extension included in the September stopgap. So for transit and highway money, both the appropriation and the underlying authorization land on the same date.
New Hampshire DOT’s FTA Section 5310 Enhanced Mobility of Seniors and Individuals with Disabilities capital program shows how that reaches an applicant. The state’s SFY2027 notice, issued October 16, 2026, estimates $441,358 available across rural, statewide and Boston urban area apportionments, with statewide funds reserved primarily for rural projects. ADA-accessible vehicles can be funded up to 85% federal. Applications go by email to the Bureau of Rail & Transit by 3:00 p.m. on January 21, 2027. Recipients sign FTA’s annual Certifications and Assurances and the FTA Master Agreement and must meet Circular C9070.1H. The notice is explicit that the amounts are approximate and that state capital match is subject to availability.
What to do in the next five weeks
- Find the funding authority sentence in every notice you are working on. It is usually one line, and it names a law or an appropriation. That sentence, not the program’s name or the fiscal year in its title, tells you whether December 11 is your problem.
- Do not read “FY27” in a title as an enacted appropriation. Both EPA Brownfields notices are labeled for fiscal 2027. No fiscal 2027 appropriation has been enacted.
- Treat estimates as estimates. NHDOT says its $441,358 is approximate and its state match is subject to availability. A number in a pass-through notice before the federal cycle closes is a planning figure.
- Keep the deadlines. January 1, January 7, January 11, January 21 and January 26 are real dates, and a late appropriations cycle does not move them. HUD extended the two FHIP deadlines by 60 days, but that was the funder’s decision about its own competition, not a rule that applies to anyone else.
- For transit and highway money, check the authorization as well as the appropriation. A Section 5310 or 5311 application is riding on both.
- Watch the anomaly list. If your program appears among the stopgap’s agency-specific provisions, read what that section actually did before assuming it protects you.
The honest summary for a grant seeker: the election rearranged the Congress that will write the next funding cycle, and left this one’s unfinished business where it was. The programs with open deadlines in January are still open, the deadlines are still the deadlines, and the only new information the election gives you about any particular notice is nothing at all. Which law pays for it still tells you more.
We will keep covering this in News & Policy as the December date gets closer. Our earlier piece on OMB’s 2 CFR 200 rewrite, which the same stopgap paused until December 11, covers the rules side of the same deadline, and the knowledge base has the background on cost share, match and pass-through awards.
Subscribe to Funding Friday, our weekly grant digest, and we will keep the open deadlines in front of you.