After frenetic 2025 activity, the Republican-led 119th Congress spent 2026 delaying or narrowing major legislation, leaving a long list of policy items unresolved just before the midterms.
Major unfinished items include no farm bill, no AI regulations, no transportation or water-resources bills, and no third reconciliation package.
A short lame-duck window and a likely change in House or Senate control make it unlikely the GOP finishes its backlog before year’s end.
The 119th Congress moved quickly in 2025. Lawmakers passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025—a wide-ranging measure packed with tax cuts, larger defense and immigration-enforcement funding, and social-services reductions. Congress also revoked many Biden-era regulations and accelerated confirmations of executive and judicial nominees.
In 2026, the mood changed. The pace slowed toward a posture best described as mañana: lawmakers repeatedly deferred major fights or advanced much narrower measures than originally promised. The House and Senate both contributed to the delays at different times.
Several consequential bills and policy areas were postponed or left unaddressed. Items explicitly called out include:
Trump, the SAVE America Act, and messaging
Former President Trump continued to push Congress publicly. He posted on Truth Social: "PASS THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!!!" That proposal was framed as a major priority—intended in part to alter how voter rolls are managed—but it remained unpassed. The article notes Trump's plan for a voting-roll purge now depends on a remote legal path involving the Supreme Court and a bid to give the Postal Service control over mail ballots.
Institutional timing and the lame-duck problem
Political and practical consequences
Observers and some lawmakers—Democratic senator Brian Schatz is cited noting the breadth of undone items—see this as a significant failure to complete the agenda Republicans had promised. The piece frames the result as leaving Trump with many of his legislative goals unfulfilled despite intensive party efforts in 2025 and intermittent campaigning on those outcomes into 2026.
President Donald Trump's longest-serving director of legislative affairs is departing this White House in the coming weeks, wrapping up nearly 600 wild, white-knuckle days of managing relations between the 47th president and the Congress. While Trump's massive 2024 electoral victory created powerful momentum in the ear
William Kristol: “Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot this November. But these midterms are a referendum on him. The 119th Congress has been controlled by the Republican party. That party’s distinctive feature, its defining characteristic, is that it has supported Trump. It’s done so uniformly, mindlessly, and obediently.
“Republicans used their midterm convention this week to ask voters to preserve their congressional majorities and let them ‘finish the job,’” Politico reports. ”But with few consensus legislative goals, it’s far from clear what job they want to finish.”
GOP lawmakers are punting major fights — including government funding, money for the war with Iran and the extension of expanded surveillance authorities — until after the November election, setting up a bloated lame-duck agenda.
The bipartisan House vote means some fights will simply be deferred to a lame-duck session, with the next shutdown threat in December.
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