WASHINGTON — The state of Congress is such that the performance of its most basic task — the orderly passage of annual spending bills that fund the government — has become this year a test of whether it can function at all.

It has been almost two decades since the House and Senate in 1996 beat the Oct. 1 deadline for approving all of the bills before the start of the new fiscal year. In recent years, the Senate has rarely considered individual appropriations bills at all, and the entire process has been reduced to an ugly combination of missed deadlines, spending standoffs, stopgaps, omnibuses, minibuses, continuing funding resolutions and even a government shutdown.

“We have lost touch with the normal order of things,” said Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican who sits on the Appropriations Committee.

Now two old-school appropriators — Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, and Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky — are trying to improve on this dismal record and deliver many, if not all, of the 12 bills for the 2015 fiscal year by Sept. 30.