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Senate Republicans are racing to complete a lengthy to-do list before leaving town Friday, including approving a stopgap spending bill aimed at averting a government shutdown before the Nov. 3 elections.

In addition to the stopgap budget bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.) is working to confirm 74 of President Donald Trump’s nominees and faces pressure to advance a $95 billion package that would provide fresh cash for the Iran war and inflation-battered farmers.

Whatever senators don’t accomplish this week is likely to be pushed to September, when Congress is scheduled to be in Washington only briefly before hitting the campaign trail.

The stopgap budget bill is up first, with a procedural vote that was expected late Monday. Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the lead Democratic appropriator, worked jointly on the bill, which would extend government funding through Dec. 11.

The measure differs in important ways from a version of the bill passed by the House: It incorporates White House requests to maintain funding for housing and nutrition programs through the fall, and it would extend an expiring authorization for veterans’ healthcare.

Additionally, it would temporarily block the White House Office of Management and Budget from adopting a rule that would give political appointees sweeping powers to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the lead Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Sunday that the Senate bill marks “a clear improvement” over the House bill, which she and most House Democrats opposed.

If the Senate approves it, the House could take the measure up when lawmakers return at the end of August. Unless Congress acts, the government is set to run out of funds on Oct. 1.

Senate Republicans are also facing a long list of presidential nominees at an array of agencies, including the Departments of State, Energy, Treasury, and Justice. The Senate could also confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general if the two Republican senators who have blocked his confirmation vote to advance it Tuesday.

Late Sunday, Blanche issued a written order formally rescinding the Trump administration’s proposal for a $1.8 billion fund for people who claim they were victims of political prosecutions — a step toward breaking the impasse.

Blanche said the revision came as part of an agreement with Senate Judiciary members including Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Thom Tillis (N.C.), who had threatened to vote against his nomination over concerns about the fund. The order came one day after Trump threatened in a Truth Social post to revive his push for the payout fund if Blanche is not confirmed.

The Judiciary Committee has scheduled a critical vote Tuesday on Blanche’s nomination.

Elsewhere, the Senate is expected to easily approve legislation to impose new sanctions on Russia, which would allow the Trump administration to levy up to 100% tariffs on the top five purchasers of Russian oil and natural gas. The measure, which was championed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) before his sudden death last month, advanced last week on a strong bipartisan vote.

And Thune has said the chamber would vote on an industry-backed cryptocurrency bill that would establish federal authority over digital assets. But the measure faces opposition on a variety of fronts, including from Democrats, who are demanding tougher ethics provisions to limit Trump’s ability to profit from his family’s crypto businesses.

Possibly the tallest order for Republicans this week is finalizing a framework for a budget package to speed cash to farmers and the Pentagon. Using a complex process known as reconciliation, GOP lawmakers could sidestep a Democratic filibuster and pass the package with Republican votes.

For the strategy to work, Senate Republicans would need near-unanimous support in their caucus. But several GOP senators have expressed opposition.

“We’re taking a hard look at it,” Thune told reporters last week. “And at the moment, as I’ve said before, we’re probably not there.”

Last month, the House passed a $95 billion budget framework that includes $73 billion for defense, $12 billion in aid for farmers and $10 billion for election-related measures, which House Republicans hope to use to impose elements of the Save America Act — a top Trump priority. That bill would require voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote and to show a photo ID at the polls.

Trump has demanded that the Senate stay in session until the election provisions pass, but Thune has said repeatedly that the bill cannot pass the Senate, even under reconciliation. Tillis, for one, has said he would not support it.

Meanwhile, multiple GOP senators have expressed other concerns with the House framework for reconciliation, including Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Bill Cassidy (La.), and Collins.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairperson Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), who has argued for closer to $300 billion for defense, told the Washington Post on Thursday that he is pushing for the higher amount. But a bigger package risks the support of fiscally conservative Republicans, who are already balking at adding $95 billion to the nation’s $39.8 trillion debt.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said the White House would need to directly request the additional funds for defense. Still, Johnson said he was “pretty optimistic” that the Senate would advance a budget framework before leaving town.

In a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and acting attorney general Todd Blanche, the chairperson of the Special Olympics — who is also Kennedy’s cousin — called on the administration to reverse course on a Justice Department memorandum that could narrow federal protections for disability care.

The letter by Tim Shriver joins a recent outcry from lawmakers and disability advocates who have warned that the June memo, which called for reinterpreting a key Supreme Court ruling on disability rights, could shrink access to home- and community-based care services that hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities rely on to receive care without being placed in institutions — a cause that members of the Kennedy family have supported throughout their political careers.

“This is something that is in some ways the central passion of our family,” Shriver told the Washington Post. “And I hope and believe that Secretary Kennedy understands that.”

The Health and Human Services Department and Justice Department did not provide a comment by the time of this article’s publication.

The memo comes as patients and caregivers brace for Medicaid cuts from President Donald Trump’s tax bill, which are also expected to hamper disability services.

“Many people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are already worried about whether the Medicaid-funded supports and services they rely on will be there in the future,” Shriver wrote in the letter sent to Kennedy and Blanche last week and shared with the Post.

Shriver, a longtime disability rights activist, said he sent the letter in his personal capacity. He has led the Special Olympics, which organizes sporting competitions for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, since 1996.

The Justice Department memo, issued in mid-June by its Office of Legal Counsel, argued for a looser reading of the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., viewed as a landmark case for disability rights. The Supreme Court ruled that it was discriminatory to institutionalize people with disabilities when they can and want to receive community-based services instead.

“Olmstead is what created the tools to require states to provide community-based services,” said Alison Barkoff, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University and a former HHS administrator during the Biden Administration.

Advocates argue that those services can be more cost-effective than institutional care and better enable people with disabilities to work and remain connected with their families and communities. Around 4.5 million Medicaid enrollees receive home- and community-based care, and hundreds of thousands more are on waitlists for the services each year, health policy research organization KFF estimated in 2024.

“These programs are the difference between a full life and … tragic mental illness, loneliness, depression, isolation, humiliation,” Shriver told the Post.

The Kennedy family has been closely involved in efforts to promote disability rights. President John F. Kennedy signed a major mental health bill in 1963 while in office and alongside Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — the health secretary’s father — pushed to shift disability care away from institutionalization and toward community-based services. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of President Kennedy and Tim Shriver’s mother, founded the Special Olympics.

The Trump administration has scrutinized home- and community-based services for fraud and argued that some states poorly oversee their home-based care programs. Advocates are also concerned that states newly strained by cuts to Medicaid could slash support for home- and community-based services.

The Justice Department memo would make it easier for states to do that, opponents have said. It argued that Olmstead does not require states to provide home- and community-based care for people with disabilities and that the federal government is not authorized to enforce such a mandate. It conceded that such an opinion is “out of step with the common understanding of that decision within the federal courts.”

Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, American Association of People with Disabilities, and Center for Public Representation denounced the Justice Department’s position. Democrats in Congress urged the department to rescind the memo.

While the Justice Department’s opinion doesn’t change the law, it could indicate that the department will step back from enforcing Olmstead, advocates said.

“It provides a signal that the Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are stepping back from that commitment to community integration,” said Lydia Dawson, the vice president of government relations for ANCOR, a national association of private community providers.

Shriver said the Trump administration’s stance threatened decades of hard-fought progress for disability care.

“I am hopeful that you will help ensure that our country continues moving forward rather than backward on the promise of inclusion,” he wrote to Kennedy and Blanche.

CHICAGO — Officially, the summit for democratic socialists across the country here over the weekend was taking place in a hotel conference facility.

But on Friday night, the real action was at a corner bar two miles away, where dozens of members of the Democratic Socialists of America crammed into a patio in the middle of a summer storm.

As the rain poured down, two DSA leaders put it bluntly: If they wanted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) to run for president — and if they wanted the DSA to endorse her — it was time to start now.

“We’re in the moment of the presidential question,” Katie Sims, an electoral organizer in Ithaca, N.Y., said at the “DSA for AOC” gathering. “Doesn’t it just make sense now?”

That was, for many, the question looming over the Democratic Socialists of America’s summit, right in the middle of the group’s most consequential summer ever.

A self-dubbed big-tent group that was essentially dormant a decade ago, the DSA has ballooned into one of the largest and most disciplined operations on the U.S. left.

The Chicago summit hosted about 600 dues-paying members who flew in from across the country to attend workshops and swap organizing strategies as their group faces greater momentum — and greater scrutiny — than ever before.

After its members helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York, DSA-backed candidates won a string of Democratic primaries this summer in deep-blue cities. The victories intensified a broader fight with centrist Democrats, some of whom signed on to a pledge declaring themselves “capitalist, not socialist.”

If upcoming primaries in Michigan and Missouri go their way, some speculated, the democratic socialists might be able to start their own small caucus on Capitol Hill.

“Before, we were putting our shoes on, or lacing our shoelaces,” said John Lewis, an engineer in New Orleans who serves as a member of the DSA’s National Political Committee, the group’s top decision-making body. “Now we’re getting ready to run.”

What’s not totally clear is for what — or, with whom at the helm.

The DSA’s 120,000 members are supposed to make decisions democratically, and there is still broad disagreement about whether and how the group might make an endorsement for the White House.

Divisions often arise over key questions: Should the DSA work within the Democratic Party or break from it? Should they back only the most committed socialists or also support those who might stray from their platform sometimes?

In the case of Ocasio-Cortez and the 2028 Democratic primary, a potential endorsement is a test of how flexible it might be to take its message on a national stage.

Ocasio-Cortez, who was not at the Chicago summit, became one of the DSA’s first two members elected to federal office when she won her initial race for Congress in 2018. But her failure to adhere to the group’s red lines on the war in Gaza prompted the national DSA to withdraw its endorsement two years ago.

She has also publicly declined to support abolishing the Senate, a moon-shot goal for the DSA, in favor of more targeted moves like ending the filibuster.

Lewis, a member of the Marxist-Leninist “Red Star” caucus within the DSA that has repudiated Ocasio-Cortez, said he expected her to run. She is active in the DSA’s New York chapter and has since shifted again on some Israeli-Palestinian issues, he pointed out.

But his former chapter was split apart by a similar endorsement question in 2020, and he cautioned against a “paper endorsement” that might fall flat with the DSA’s base.

“It has to be something that people can deeply believe in,” he said, “and someone that people deeply trust to do this.”

Palestinian poetry and engineered conflict

In the halls of the hotel conference center in Chicago, an independent bookstore sold titles on mass incarceration, Palestinian poetry and theories of engineered conflict. Chapters set up tables offering T-shirts to “Melt ICE” and stickers to “stop arming Israel.”

Similar messages appeared on DSA members themselves. Some wore green “Groundwork” hats, for the environmentally minded group within the DSA that advocates for working within the Democratic Party. Others had coffee mug tattoos to rep their allegiance to the Marxist Unity Group — MUG for short.

At one workshop on Friday morning, the standing-room-only crowd was instructed to break out into small groups with a prompt: what they didn’t think was possible beforehand that feels attainable now.

In the back corner, a group of three from New York, California, and Kentucky went around introducing themselves — the name tag for each “comrade,” as some call themselves, lists only first names and last initials.

The woman from New York answered the prompt by mentioning Ocasio-Cortez. (DSA members, aside from those in elected office or on the NPC, were instructed not to talk to reporters at the conference, and that member declined to share their last name for privacy reasons.)

“We’ve all known Alex. We’ve all organized with her over the years,” she said. “This is the first time in 10 years I feel like she has a real shot at the presidency.”

Like many other DSA members at this summit, Ocasio-Cortez worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The future New York congresswoman was, of course, still years away from making it to Congress and nearly a decade away from the minimum age to run for the White House.

If the DSA had previously functioned as a home for some politically frustrated millennials, it grew into much more than that. A series of galvanizing events over the last few years — Trump’s reelection, the war in Gaza, Mamdani’s victory — have ballooned the DSA in size, with more than 140 chapters around the country.

Some have been wrapped into each chapter’s social events. Others were drawn in by local causes or campaigns.

The ability to put all those people to work — out knocking doors and phone-banking voters — is what has made the DSA an electoral force in some cities.

Sims, who leads the DSA’s national electoral strategy, said chapters carefully decide if they have the capacity to boost a candidate before endorsing them — or sometimes recruiting them. Only those candidates endorsed by local chapters go to national leaders for a possible endorsement later on.

To beat campaigns with more money, Sims said, “we really got to put our feet where our mouth is.”

Still, debates over how exactly to put that electoral strategy into practice have roiled the DSA in recent years.

Some of the more staunchly Marxist factions hold a harder line against candidates who don’t always talk about being a socialist or adhere to all parts of the group’s platform. Other caucuses, like Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucuses, which dominate the New York chapter, may be more open to putting resources behind such DSA members.

There’s an added challenge with congressional candidates like Will Lawrence and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who have not formally adopted the DSA label or received the group’s backing — perhaps intentionally — but back platforms that resemble those of democratic socialists.

A presidential endorsement would amplify that debate — and do so across every DSA chapter.

The DSA’s 2020 endorsement of Sanders followed intense internal discussion, though participating members ultimately approved it.

“Everybody is well aware that everything we’re doing right now as DSA is either setting us up or not setting us up to be serious political players in the 2028 election,” said Frances Gill, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and NPC member.

Summit participants were slated to hold a closed-door discussion on whether and how to endorse later in the weekend.

Alex Pellitteri, a union organizer in New York City who is leading the DSA’s “presidential exploratory group,” compared the upsides to Mamdani’s citywide race in his hometown.

Before the campaign, the DSA’s New York chapter — by far its largest, making up about 1 in 8 of the group’s members — had largely only supported campaigns in its strongest bases of support in Brooklyn and Queens.

Part of the argument for endorsing Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was to get its muscular canvassing operation into parts of the city where they had never knocked a door. Backing a presidential candidate, he said, could enable the group to do the same across the country.

But there are still questions over what that might look like — and risks.

Some people who want to sketch out a “model of co-governance” for SIOs — socialists-in-office — at the presidential level before endorsing. Others want to reconcile an endorsement with the group’s platform, formally dubbed the “national program,” which advocates for replacing the presidency with a parliamentary system.

And then there’s the reality that Ocasio-Cortez could very well choose not to seek out the White House.

At the “DSA for AOC” event at an off-site bar on Friday night, a fellow comrade came up to Sims to ask the second question on everyone’s mind: Is there anyone else they’d want to encourage?

Sims paused and thought for a second.

“Well,” they said, “no one.”