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Prior to grocery shopping, you make a shopping list based on your needs and overall budget. When you go grocery shopping, you spend most of your time putting things in your cart, mentally keeping track of how much your total is. Then you go to the cashier and pay.

All of Congress spends the entire year writing legislation that commits the government to spending money (aka making the shopping list and putting groceries in the cart). Then they total it up in a spending bill at the end of the year (aka going to the cashier to pay).

It has long been argued that the portions of the spending bills to fund legislation that’s already been voted for shouldn’t even be necessary. To repeat: the spending bill shouldn’t even need to exist.

So in essence, everyone has already read 98% of the spending bill before it’s technically authored because they argued about (and read the text of) the individual bills that committed the government to spend this money before the individual votes.

The thing to actually complain about is that last bit of stuff they throw in specifically because they know the overall spending bill must pass (again, because everyone already committed to spending that money throughout the year).