Congress returns to a shutdown deadline and a health care fight
- - Congress returns to a shutdown deadline and a health care fight
Sahil KapurJanuary 5, 2026 at 2:00 AM
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The U.S. Capitol on Dec. 2. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The House and the Senate are scheduled to return this week after the holidays and confront a growing list of tasks and potential agenda items in early 2026.
Top of mind for many is President Donald Trump's decision over the weekend to launch strikes in Venezuela and capture leader Nicolás Maduro, in addition to his assertion that the U.S. will “run” the country for the foreseeable future.
It'll add to an already substantial to-do list for Congress in the early part of the year as November's midterm elections draw closer. Here are five issues facing Capitol Hill:
Health care fight
January on Capitol Hill will be heavily shaped by a fight over health care after enhanced tax credits for 22 million people under Obamacare expired, leading to sharp premium hikes beginning this month.
In the House, four Republicans in swing districts teamed up with all Democrats to sideline Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and force a vote in the full House on a three-year extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies. That is expected this week. But while it’s likely to pass the House, Senate Republicans told NBC News before the holidays that the bill is dead on arrival in the upper chamber.
Can anything pass both chambers and undo the premium hikes? It’s unclear.
Many GOP senators want the ACA funds to expire entirely, and Trump has encouraged them by slamming the funds. The few who are open to an extension have moved further apart from Democrats in recent months over how to achieve that. They are demanding eligibility limits and new anti-fraud safeguards on the money (which Democrats are open to), as well as tougher abortion restrictions (which Democrats say is a nonstarter).
Without a breakthrough, millions of people will pay more for health insurance this year, downgrade to less substantial plans or go without insurance altogether. That could be a potent weapon for Democrats in the midterm elections, as polls show Republicans will suffer more of the blame for higher costs. Some in the GOP worry that failing to pass a law extending the funds would cost their party seats and even hand Democrats the House majority.
Government funding deadline
The most important task Congress faces this month is to fund the government by the Jan. 30 deadline. That comes on the heels of the longest shutdown in U.S. history last fall.
Democrats allowed the government to shutter last fall while demanding a continuation of the ACA funds. But this time, they appear unlikely to threaten a shutdown.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last month it would be “very hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube” after Jan. 1 in response to a question about whether Democrats will use the same tactic to try to revive the health care subsidies.
Asked whether she expects another showdown over the ACA as part of a government funding bill, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said just before the holidays: “I don’t. That’s just me.”
Shaheen is a key figure in the debate — an Appropriations Committee member, she has been at the forefront of ACA talks, and she was one of eight Democrats who voted to reopen the government in November.
Still, that’s far from the only issue.
As part of the November deal, Congress passed three out of the 12 appropriations bills to fund the government through September. The nine others will be more difficult to secure bicameral deals on. Appropriators, who are tasked with writing government funding bills, feel confident they can pass at least some, but they may have to default to another continuing resolution to keep the rest of the government funded at current levels temporarily to prevent a shutdown.
As long as Republicans can unify and pass a short-term funding bill through the House on their own, without much Democratic help, the Senate will face immense pressure to pass it.
Maduro briefings and a war debate
Members of Congress say they expect briefings by the Trump administration as early as this week on Trump's extraordinary — and controversial — attack on Venezuela.
While Republican leaders are rallying around Trump's decision, some GOP lawmakers and most Democrats have criticized the move, questioning its legality and wisdom.
And Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, said he wants to force a Senate vote to reassert war powers that the Constitution reserves for Congress, not the executive branch.
That debate, which carries major domestic and international stakes, will play out in the weeks ahead. The briefings may be tense; several Democrats have accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of misleading Congress, or outright lying, in the run-up to the operation.
Stock trading ban
It's a populist cause that brings together an unusual coalition on the right and the left, even though it has tended to quietly fizzle in recent years. The duo of Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., is trying to change that now with the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would ban members of Congress and spouses from owning and trading stocks.
Roy said the authors have made "enormous progress."
"I feel like we'll be able to move on it early next year," he said in December. "I feel like we're in a really good place, and I think we're going to deliver a good product in the early part of the year."
Democratic leadership is backing the cause.
"There's overwhelming support for the legislation to ban congressional stock trading. It is long past time that that is done," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told reporters last month while criticizing Johnson for showing "zero interest" in putting the bill to a vote.
But it may not be Johnson's decision. Before Congress left for the holidays, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., filed a discharge petition to force the bill to the floor. It has 74 signers. If it reaches 218, it must get a full House vote.
“The clock is now running. If leadership does not move quickly to put forward a strong ban on congressional stock trading, the members of the body will act,” Roy and Magaziner said in a joint statement.
AI regulation and protecting children online
Regulating artificial intelligence and protecting kids on the internet have been the subjects of considerable debate in recent months, but Congress has failed to pass laws on either front. Could that change in 2026? Some lawmakers certainly hope so.
Capitol Hill's failure to act on AI regulation has led more than three dozen states to take matters into their own hands. Big tech firms are pleading with Washington to shut down state regulations so they don't have to navigate 50 sets of laws. Republicans tried to bar state AI regulation last year, but critics slammed the idea of doing so without creating a national standard that addresses a range of concerns, such as using malicious deepfakes to sway elections.
Trump stepped in last month with an executive order calling for "a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI."
In 2024, the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (known as COPPA 2.0) in a package by an overwhelming vote of 91-3. Then the bills, which were opposed by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, who deemed them too broad, died in the Republican-led House. Now, a key House committee is looking at a narrower package of bills aimed at protecting kids from harm online. But it remains to be seen what can pass the full House — and what the Senate, which has changed to Republican hands since the earlier bills passed, can stomach.
Source: “AOL Breaking”
