The Topline Is The Decoy
The continuing resolution that Congress passed in early May carries a topline number of $1.16 trillion. That is the number on the press release. That is the number every member of leadership cited in the floor speeches. That is also the number that bears the loosest possible relationship to the actual federal commitment being made by the legislation. Follow the money. I did the math. You will not like it.
The $1.16 trillion topline covers the discretionary spending authority for the affected agencies for the back half of fiscal year 2026. The supplementals attached to the same legislative vehicle add another $480 billion. The continuing authorities attached as section riders authorize another $260 billion in obligations that fall outside the topline because they are technically continuations of existing programs rather than new spending. Add them up. The actual federal commitment from this single piece of legislation is $1.9 trillion. The press release said $1.16 trillion. The difference, $740 billion, is approximately the GDP of Sweden.
Where The $480 Billion In Supplementals Went
The supplementals carried, in order of dollar amount, additional appropriations for: Ukraine and Israel security assistance combined at $112 billion. Disaster relief tied to the 2025 hurricane and wildfire seasons at $87 billion. A category called economic security and resilience grants that nobody in leadership wanted to explain on the floor, $79 billion. Additional appropriations for the Department of Defense above the topline at $68 billion. Border security at $34 billion. A category of miscellaneous health and human services accounts totaling $51 billion. The remaining $49 billion was distributed across roughly forty smaller accounts.
Some of these expenditures are defensible. The Israel security assistance, given the situation in the eastern Mediterranean, is defensible on national security grounds even if you have a view that the dollar amount is too high. The disaster relief is defensible because the disasters happened. The Ukraine portion is more contested but is at least subject to a public policy debate. The other $400 billion is harder to defend on the public record because most of it was inserted in conference, with minimal floor debate, and in some cases without a public score from the Congressional Budget Office.
The Section Riders Are Where The Real Money Hides
The section riders are the part of any continuing resolution that nobody reads. The May 2026 CR carried 173 section riders. Of those, 41 authorized obligations exceeding $1 billion individually. The largest, in section 8003 of the bill, extended a category of Department of Energy loan guarantee authority that the relevant agency has used to obligate approximately $52 billion in commitments over the last fifteen months. The press summary did not mention section 8003. The conference committee report mentioned it in passing. The actual obligation authority lives in a footnote on page 1,247.
Read that number again. $52 billion in loan guarantee authority obligated over fifteen months by one agency, on the basis of section riders that get extended by reference in every continuing resolution. Your tax dollars are guaranteeing loans that the executive branch is making to recipients that the executive branch chooses, under terms that the executive branch sets, with disclosure requirements that the executive branch designs. Congress is in the loop in the sense that Congress signs the authorization. Congress is not in the loop in the sense that any individual member could tell you what the loans were for.
The Per-Taxpayer Number
The federal government has approximately 134 million individual income tax filers. The $1.9 trillion commitment from the May CR works out to about $14,200 per filer. Your share, if you are an average filer, of this one piece of legislation is $14,200. The legislation passed on a 7-day continuing resolution clock, with floor debate that totaled approximately 11 hours in the House and 6 hours in the Senate. The cost per minute of debate is about $2.1 billion. Read that number again.
The members who voted for the bill, if you ask them, will tell you that the alternative was a government shutdown. That is technically true. It is also the framing the appropriations process has used to extract every continuing resolution since 1981. The shutdown framing is the leverage. The leverage works. The dollar amount is the consequence.
The CBO Score Tells The Honest Story
The Congressional Budget Office published a partial score of the May CR three business days after passage. The score is partial because the supplementals were not fully scored at the time of the floor vote, and the section riders are not scored at all under standard CBO practice because they are technically continuations rather than new authority. The CBO's partial score, on a static basis, adds approximately $1.4 trillion to the federal debt over the ten-year window. On a dynamic basis, accounting for economic feedback, the score adds approximately $1.6 trillion. The difference between the static and dynamic numbers is the part economists argue about. The aggregate is the part that ends up on the debt ceiling.
The next debt ceiling negotiation, by the Treasury Department's current projection, will occur in late October. The Treasury's extraordinary measures will run out in early September. The market is going to price the next negotiation starting in August. The arithmetic, by then, will already be the arithmetic. The negotiation will be about who gets blamed for the arithmetic, not about whether the arithmetic exists.
Follow The Money
Follow the money. I will do the math for you. Every time. The math is going to keep being uncomfortable. The math is also going to keep being the math.
