Like the high school senior who has procrastinated until the last week before finals, the historically unproductive 113^th Congress now finds itself with a lengthy to-do list just 10 days before it adjourns for the summer. Facing an array of deadlines and expiring provisions (some already past), lawmakers seem unlikely to do much more than scrape together some temporary extensions, at least until after the elections. At some point, maybe during a lame duck session, Congress must summon the political will to cooperate long enough to accomplish something because the budgetary challenges we face aren’t going away.

For starters, billions of dollars worth of so-called tax extenders – temporary provisions (mostly cuts) in the tax code – expired last year. From deductions for higher education to research and experimentation credits, the extenders expiration has left individuals and businesses wondering what their taxes are going to be. The Senate extended some of them for two more years, while the House has made a few permanent. And while everyone agrees the entire tax code needs to be simplified and reformed — 1986 was the last overhaul – that broader effort has gone nowhere.

The Highway Trust Fund (HTF), which funds construction on our nation’s beleaguered roads and bridges, will run out of money next month. The timing is especially bad because summer is the busy time for road crews, and an empty HTF means payments and projects will have to pump the brakes. Congress knew this was coming – it’s been supplementing gas tax revenues to bolster the fund every year since 2008, successfully avoiding the program’s underlying problem of an insufficient revenue stream. If we’re lucky, this Congress will find some way to cover the shortfall for the remainder of the year, even though the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate disagree on how to do that. Real reform of the HTF will be a much heavier lift.

The flip side of the transportation funding problem is the transportation spending problem. Not long after highway funding runs out, the Surface Transportation Bill expires. This is where Congress sets transportation spending priorities, theoretically for multiple years given the timeline of large transportation projects. The last four-year bill Congress passed was in 2005. It passed a miserable two-year bill in 2012 (MAP-21), with nine short-term extensions in between. Though some lawmakers are now calling for a six-year transportation bill, there has been little progress towards that goal.

The end of September also marks the end of the federal government’s fiscal year, and unless Congress passes spending bills  for the following year, the government will shut down, again. After last’s year’s  shutdown, the House and Senate budget committee chairs, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), agreed on overall budget totals for the next two years so House and Senate appropriations committees could at least work off the same page. The idea was to make it easier, and more likely, for a divided Congress to actually produce a complete set of appropriations bills. As of today, however, the Senate hasn’t passed even one of the 12 appropriations bills required to fund the federal government next year. The House has passed six.

Add to this already-daunting list: the $3.7 billion the Administration has asked for to deal with the flood of minors along the border (to say nothing of comprehensive immigration reform), a resolution to the problems of health care delivery for veterans, the expiration of the charter for the Export-Import Bank, and the sunset of Terrorism Risk Insurance – all this year – and it becomes difficult to see how Congress gets it all done in the time it has left. 

Unfortunately, the political paralysis of Congress has become a maxim in Washington, and it has real costs. Congress’ general inability to set spending priorities through the regular order of hearings and votes makes it even more difficult to tackle systemic problems, like the convoluted and inefficient tax code. Barely able to agree on even temporary fixes, Congress lurches from one budget crisis to another, some of their own making, like transportation funding. New problems emerge, like the border crisis, which require time and energy, while deadlines come and go. If the 113^th Congress were a class of high school seniors, it is hard to imagine any teacher giving them a passing grade.