Congress stopped the clock ticking toward a government shutdown early Saturday after the Senate followed the GOP-controlled House’s lead in passing a stopgap measure that runs through March.
The latest: The resolution came after a Trump-backed plan to suspend the debt ceiling failed in the House Thursday and was nixed from the funding plan.
What he’s saying: Despite President-elect Trump’s Friday comment on Truth Social that “If there’s going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden administration,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), told reporters after the vote he was in “constant contact” with Trump.
State of play: An earlier version of the stopgap measure lost 38 Republican votes and gained two Democratic ones before legislators pushed a revised bill through both chambers.
The approved resolution will fund the government until March, provide about $100 billion for disaster aid and extend the farm bill for a year, but legislators nixed elements of the earlier plan that would have suspended the debt ceiling until January 2027.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called it a “laughable proposal.”
What was in the first bill?
Congressional leaders unveiled legislation Tuesday to keep the government funded until March, setting up a showdown — with Johnson in the central pressure cooker.
It included around $100 billion in disaster relief, an extension of the farm bill and restrictions on investments in China. The 1,547-page bill includes wants from both Democrats’ and Republicans’ wish lists.
But some measures raised eyebrows: Notably, a pay raise for members of Congress (their first since 2009), caught the attention of Musk and others bashing the bill.
The mid-March extension date tees up another funding fight toward the end of Trump’s first 100 days in office.
What’s next, and what does it mean?
Lawmakers were able to push a deal through just after a midnight Saturday deadline, and Biden signed the resolution later Saturday.
The legislative save means stopping a shutdown just as lawmakers were meant to go on holiday recess.
For thousands of non-essential federal employees, a shutdown would have meant they stopped working.
That maneuver was also a face-plant, with the House voting it down decisively on Thursday; notably, 38 Republicans joined the Democratic caucus in rejecting it, incensed by the debt limit ploy. In seeking to browbeat congressional Republicans into submission ahead of taking office, the Trump-Musk administration instead provoked a greater uprising of spending hawks aligned with the Freedom Caucus than the Biden White House ever managed to.
The final bill that won passage disaggregated the main spending priorities of the prior two continuing resolutions into three stand-alone bills: the principal government-funding ask, combined with a $110 billion package of hurricane and agricultural relief aid, and a major bill called the farm law, combining anti-poverty and agricultural reform measures. After all the oligarchic sound and fury that overtook the spending negotiations, the end result isn’t all that different than what the House had started with.