The government is one week away from possible shutdown with lawmakers apparently nowhere near a deal to fund the government into 2023.

And while most observers expect that issue to get resolved one way or another in the coming weeks, the brinkmanship appears to be jeopardizing another effort: the long-delayed retirement reform legislation informally known as SECURE 2.0.

The package, if enacted, would make a host of changes to how Americans save for retirement — from increasing the age for required minimum distributions to pushing businesses to get more employees enrolled in plans — and would help address a looming retirement crisis for many.

“There has been a narrow window for SECURE Act 2.0 to pass but the window is closing with each passing day,” Stifel Chief Washington Policy Strategist Brian Gardner told Yahoo Finance.

The latest round of negotiations this week ended with leaders on Capitol Hill seemingly as far apart as ever. On one side, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is charging that Democrats are trying to “hijack the government funding process,” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is now openly discussing the possibility of a short-term extension to government funding, which would likely ice retirement reform efforts for now.

“I hope we don’t go down that road,” Schumer said.

“I think the pressure will start to build up for them moving through next week” said Lance Schoening, Principal Financial Group’s director of policy, in an interview Friday. He remains optimistic that passage is still possible, but notes that his worst-case scenario is a short-term government funding extension that moves into next year.

"Then I think we're into a year to multi-year effort to get SECURE 2.0 back into the discussion,” he said.

What the bill would do

The bill aims to follow up 2019’s SECURE Act, which represented the first major retirement legislation since 2006. When that bill passed, lawmakers vowed not to wait so long again, but have seen a roller coaster of ups and downs in their next effort.

The SECURE 2.0 process has proven complicated even by Capitol Hill’s standards with four committees on both sides involved in what has become almost two years of negotiations. It was in May 2021 when an early version of the bill first passed out of the House Ways and Means committee.

But now, lawmakers have largely coalesced behind a range of ideas for the final package and decided that the best path to passage was to attach it to a government funding bill. But now, "we just need an unrelated task to actually be completed for us to ride on it,” Schoening said.

The 2019 SECURE Act passed using this same strategy, getting attached to that year's appropriations bill and signed into law on December 20, 2019, by then-President Donald Trump.

An overall goal of the new package would be to nudge businesses to get more people enrolled in retirement plans with a focus on small businesses that have trouble offering plans or part-time employees at larger companies who are currently ineligible to enroll.

Another key provision would change the age when people must start taking mandatory distributions from their private retirement plans. The SECURE Act increased the required minimum distribution age to 72, from 70. Lawmakers want to lift it again to 75.

The plan could also change the rules and allow linking student loans and retirement savings or emergency and retirement savings. In both cases, lawmakers hope to make it easier for Americans to put aside some money for long-term retirement while addressing more pressing financial concerns.

“There's some folks that have been left on the sidelines of the retirement savings game,” American Council of Life Insurers Vice President Kathleen Coulombe recently told Yahoo Finance Live. She represents one of many groups hoping to get the bill over the finish line and added “it really seeks to help a lot of these vulnerable populations.”

Another significant measure includes a prod to employers to automatically enroll new employees in the company’s retirement plan if they are eligible. Studies have shown that employers with auto-enrollment retirement plans have much higher rates of participation.

Other ideas include changes to the SAVERS credit, which lets certain lower-income workers get additional tax breaks when they save for retirement, as well as the creation of a "clearinghouse" for employees to find lost retirement accounts.

What Secure 2.0 wouldn’t address is the challenge of Social Security, which could run low on funds as early as 2034.

The uncertain path ahead

But the bill’s fate is now uncertain as Congress has struggled to agree on measures that aren't absolutely required to pass before the end of the year.

Lawmakers are closer to clearing another one of these "must-pass" bills, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but that effort has stripped out any measure seen as extraneous. Advocates for reforming marijuana banking rules, reining in Big Tech, and energy permitting reform had planned to attach legislation to the NDAA but instead saw nearly everything removed.

Gardner said action on retirement may still be possible and “given the bipartisan nature of the bill, it is possible to attach it to an omnibus or a tax extenders bill, but given the lack of progress on each, the odds of passing the SECURE Act 2.0 are declining.”

Congress is set to return Monday to continue trying to hammer out a deal. Schoening said that if the lawmakers fail, “we're going to be in a holding pattern to some extent in terms of what we see in the retirement system going forward.”

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.