The next House speaker will inherit a mountain of work that threatens the stability of their speakership before it even begins

• House Republicans are still trying to figure out who they want as the next speaker.
• It's been weeks since McCarthy was ousted, and work is piling up on the speaker's desk.

It may be days or even weeks before a majority of representatives elect a new House speaker, but one thing is certain: The next speaker will have a huge amount of responsibilities to quickly deal with after taking office.

House Republicans began the secret voting process on Tuesday morning to whittle down the 8 remaining speaker candidates until only one remains. But as the past few weeks have shown, that doesn't guarantee they'll have coalesced enough party support to win the speakership.

Once that hurdle is overcome, there's one thing the new speaker most certainly will need to take care of, and fast: keeping the government funded.

As it stands, Congress has until November 17 to avoid a government shutdown and ensure federal workers, contractors, and members of the military remain paid. Congress just narrowly avoided closing shop on October 1 after former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy struck a last-minute bargain on a 45-day continuing resolution at the end of September to keep the lights on. That same agreement, however, was what ultimately led to his historic ouster.

While the House has been speakerless, war broke out in the Middle East in early October after Hamas terrorists launched an attack on Israeli civilians. The Biden Administration requested permission from Congress to send $14.3 billion of support to Israel in response to the fighting, but Congress won't be able to do anything about it until a new speaker is chosen.

The Biden Administration has also asked Congress to approve $61.4 billion in aid to Ukraine in its prolonged fight against Russian forces, which may be a tougher hurdle for some members of Congress to get on board with as the fighting's gone on since February 2022 and the government's already approved of $75 billion in assistance.

On top of this, Congress' farm bill — which is rewritten every five years — has already expired with some of its most important programs being temporarily propped up by the aforementioned continuing resolution to keep the government funded for 45 days.

It'll likely take several months for the House and Senate to come to an agreement on the terms of such a deal, which includes support for federal food stamps and comes at a time when the country's farm economy isn't faring too well.

Federal officials are also asking Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before it expires at the end of the year, which the assistant attorney general called "among the most consequential national security decisions we face as a country."

With the fierce amount of partisanship on display in the House and the GOP holding such a narrow majority, there's no assurance that all or even any of these bills get tackled at all before the year's end.

Perhaps most critically, House rules still dictate that it only takes one member to begin the process of ousting a speaker, as is what happened to McCarthy.

This means there's also an increasing possibility the bills are each tackled by a series of different speakers, each one gaining authority after their predecessor gets the boot for disgruntling a select few members for passing one of the above bills.

The mountain of responsibilities the next speaker needs to urgently take care of is getting bigger and bigger. An avalanche of some sort appears inevitable, with its full consequences still to come.