WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is taking up a $145 billion spending bill to fund the Energy Department and veterans’ programs for the next budget year.

Approval of the bill Monday would send it back to the House, which approved a similar bill this month. Lawmakers hope to send a unified bill to President Donald Trump as the first of what they hope will be a series of spending bills signed into law before the new budget year begins Oct. 1.

Individual spending measures have routinely been delayed or ignored in recent years in favor of giant — often months overdue — spending packages that fund the entire government.

GOP leaders are anxious to avoid another massive spending bill as the midterm elections approach. Trump has pledged he won’t sign another catchall measure like the $1.3 trillion bill he signed in March.

The three-bill bundle being debated Monday includes a $5.1 billion increase for the Department of Veterans Affairs, including $1.1 billion to pay for a law Trump signed in June to give veterans more freedom to see doctors outside the troubled VA system.

The bill includes $43.8 billion for energy and water programs, including programs to ensure nuclear stockpile readiness and spur innovation in energy research. The bill also funds flood-control projects and addresses regional ports and waterways.

Lawmakers focused less on those details than on the vote itself, calling early approval of a spending bill the beginning of a return to “regular order” that has eluded Congress for years.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, hailed the bill’s impending passage and said he hoped it signals Senate passage of all 12 spending bills by the end of September.

“It is my hope that we will not be led astray down the path of delay and partisanship that results in yet another omnibus,” Shelby said, using a congressional term for the catch-all spending bill. “That is no way to fund the government.”

Shelby praised the panel’s vice chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, for helping him keep partisan policy riders out of the legislation. Such riders are considered “poison pills” because they imperil final passage of the bill. Lawmakers banished one such rider last week, an effort by Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky that would have scrapped the Obama administration’s Clean Water Rule.

Lee, Paul and other Republicans consider the rule intrusive and say it unfairly expands authority of the Environmental Protection Agency. Republican senators — even some who agree with Lee and Paul — called the amendment inappropriate and voted with Democrats to shelve it.