In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.
“LSC would welcome reauthorization,” Flagg said. “We haven’t hidden from it. Every budget cycle, we go through an exhaustive process before Congress appropriates funds—dozens of meetings with leaders of both parties.
“We demonstrate our return on investment, how we help 2 million Americans get life-saving legal help.”
LSC now stands as the United States’ oldest “zombie” program, but it’s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government—with actions such as eliminating the entire Education Department—it’s sobering to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30.
The zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. In a 2024 deep dive, CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don’t know how much funding the other programs received.
“A lot of programs don’t get reauthorized because Congress is OK with how they’re operating,” Josh Huder, a former congressional staffer now at the Georgetown University Government Affairs Institute, said. “They continue to get annual appropriations because most members think they’re worthwhile.”
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t addressed the zombies that are prowling the federal spreadsheets. According to experts, given DOGE’s headlong push to first root out alleged waste, fraud, and abuse and ask questions later, zombies may offer a ripe target.
“One could imagine that if DOGE is clued into the notion of expired authorizations, they’ll think a program is defunct,” Sarah Binder, senior fellow at Brookings and professor of political science at George Washington University, said. According to her, this would be a mistake.
“If Congress is still appropriating money to the programs, they’re not zombies,“ she said. ”They’re living, breathing agencies.”
Binder said the fault lies not with the agencies, some of which have become important enough to be household names, but Congress. Lawmakers have made it so difficult to accomplish their most fundamental tasks, such as funding the government for another year, that they hardly ever get around to doing other important things, such as reauthorizing existing programs.
The Foreign Relations Authorization Act, for example, expired in 2003. Yet in 2024, Congress spent $38.4 billion on 24 of the law’s programs, allowing legislators to influence the White House’s foreign policy and security assistance to other nations.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce, now led by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), supported the funding of 346 expired programs, more than any other committee, the CBO found. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, now chaired by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), spent more identifiable money than any other group: $153.5 billion.
“Congress’s job doesn’t stop when they allocate the money,” Casey Burgat, professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, said. “They have to oversee it. And when they fail to do that they open themselves up to somebody else doing that. In this case, an aggressive executive branch in the form of DOGE.”
Of the 1,503 agencies or programs, 22 remain alive that required a reauthorization vote as long ago as the 1980s, according to the CBO. In addition to LSC, whose authorization expired in 1980, and the FEC (which had a 1981 reauthorization deadline), the zombies pushing middle age include the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees the country’s power grids (1984) and the Energy Information Administration (EIA), whose data inform U.S. policymaking (1984).
Congress has appropriated annual funding for EIA since its inception in 1977, the agency said in an emailed statement.
“Subsequent legislation has continued to direct EIA to conduct data collection, analysis and dissemination activities consistent with our mission as the nation’s premier source of energy information,” it said. Spokespeople for the FEC, FERC, and the CBO declined to comment.
The CBO’s list of 1,000-plus agencies and programs with expired reauthorization deadlines offers a window into the variety and volume of federal government activity, from grants for removing lead from drinking water and protecting against radon to collecting statistics on prison rape.
Environmental and health programs populate the list, from the Energy Star appliance program to programs monitoring water quality at beaches, funding medical care for children with asthma, and supporting the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. There are also provisions for improved airport security, protection of railroad first responders, and working capital for the Department of Homeland Security. Like a cherry on top, there’s also funding for the Office of Government Ethics.
‘Congress Doesn’t Have the Time’
DOGE steps into that vacuum with constitutional limitations. In 1974, Congress enacted the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits presidents from refusing to spend the money that Congress allocates.The Trump administration has challenged the constitutionality of the impoundment law, and DOGE is an ongoing test of the separation of powers between the legislative branch and the executive.
“Authorizations and appropriations are both law,” Binder said. “As long as Congress is voting to spend money on these programs, it would be an impoundment to close them. It would be unconstitutional.”
To remedy the situation, Congress would have to go through the list of zombies and decide whether to reauthorize each one, a tedious process that evidently has hovered nowhere near the top of its priority list.
“Congress doesn’t have the time to do good institutional housecleaning,” Binder said. “There are a lot of little programs, but also a good deal of big ones. They don’t have the capacity to keep tabs on the authorizations.”
For now, Flagg waits with cautious optimism, wary about how DOGE will perceive his agency but confident that after a half-century, LSC has the ability to stand up for itself.
“During the first Trump administration we got a raise in money because Congress members don’t view our work as a partisan issue,” Flagg said. “LSC has an ability to go to Congress with the facts.
“We publish grants, we tell you how many people were served and how many cases were closed and how technology has been advanced and how funding has been leveraged by volunteers. We’re able to make those points to Congress as part [of] the annual funding process.
“I’m not sure other agencies have the same ability to advocate for the quality of their work.”