Every Halloween we see people dressed as zombies, imitating the catatonic and clumsy evildoers in nearly 600 bad movies. In Haitian folklore, a zombie is a dead body reanimated through Vodou magic, but in the movies they all have one thing in common: no matter how many times they are killed, they keep coming back.

In government the word “zombie” commonly describes federal programs – sometimes entire agencies – which have expired but nevertheless continue operating as if nothing has changed. There are hundreds of them.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issues annual reports on “expired and expiring authorizations,” and the number and scope of such programs – now called “zombie programs” – is stunning. At the beginning of 2025, the preliminary report showed that Congress had appropriated a half trillion dollars – $500,000,000,000 – to 457 agencies/programs whose legal authority to exist had expired. Another 304 programs have expired since then – all of them still operating.

No wonder Ronald Reagan said the nearest thing to eternal life on Earth is a government program.

It is important to note the difference between agencies’ legal “authorization” – the laws under which Congress creates agencies and programs, giving them legal “authority” – and their annual appropriations – the money with which to carry out their duties. Legally, Congress must pass both. Every agency needs the law telling it what to do, and the money to do it. Under its own rules, Congress cannot appropriate money to programs that do not have “authorization” laws already on the books. Members in both Houses can raise points of order against even considering appropriations for programs “not authorized by law.” Yet both Houses ignore that rule – year after year after year. Points of order are often raised but routinely overruled, usually by voice votes, or even by unanimous consent with no vote at all.

Congress has become mostly dysfunctional with respect to both the authorization bills and the appropriations. In fact, it seems almost a sure bet that Congress can’t pass any bill on any subject anymore, so fierce is the infighting and partisan bickering. That leaves the executive branch free to operate under policies set by executive orders rather than laws. And the money flies in on autopilot with Congress hardly involved at all.

That’s because Congress no longer passes the “required” annual appropriation bills. There are 12 of them, but it has been 32 years since Congress passed all 12 – a decade since it has passed even one of them. So, because money cannot be spent without an appropriation, both Houses hastily throw everything together in “continuing resolutions,” funding the entire government at existing levels for a few weeks at a time, beginning the whole embarrassing process again.

The same dysfunction also prevents many of the existing authorizations from being renewed, since Members rarely agree among themselves on any needed changes or updates in policy. Thus, much of the government operates on autopilot without congressional authority or oversight. The task is not as daunting as it might seem. Much of the money flowing to “zombie programs” involves only 23 specific expired laws, according to the CBO report. Those include authorizations for veterans’ health care, foreign relations, national defense, energy policy, housing, Head Start, and a few others. Several entire agencies have expired, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Election Commission, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA. A few others have never been authorized by Congress at all, including FEMA and OMB (both created by executive orders, not laws).

That is not an insurmountable workload, even for politicians: this year Congress has already enacted 36 laws, and the previous Congress enacted 274 in two years. Many of those were inconsequential, which is why Members were able to agree on them. But surely continuing authority for the $835 billion national defense system, or the $44 billion energy and water programs, should be higher priorities than naming post offices after dead people.

I’m glad that many, if not most, federal programs have expiration dates. Coloradans are justifiably proud that their state became the first, in 1976, to enact a state “sunset law,” under which regulatory agencies and programs are automatically discontinued after a specified time, unless reauthorized by the legislature. At least 27 states have enacted various sunset laws since then, roughly half of which are still in force, and we often hear advocates ask why the federal government doesn’t have similar protections against eternal bureaucracies. But in fact, most federal programs and agencies do have expiration dates. The problem is that under the irresponsible routine that has evolved in recent decades, expired programs get automatically continued, not automatically abolished.

That’s why, legal authority notwithstanding, federal agencies just keep going, like the zombies that can never be killed. Congress should fix the sunset process to be more like Colorado. If re-authorizations are not passed, programs should automatically be abolished, not continued. In the movies, zombies are not vampires, so they are not afraid of the sunset – but perhaps they should be.

Wil Armstrong is an entrepreneur and investor in Denver, and the chairman of the Board of Trustees at Colorado Christian University.