Shutdown threat looms after stop-gap spending bill fails on House floor

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t been sworn in yet but he’s already running Washington again in his familiar style of upheaval and intraparty drama, which has Congress careening towards a government shutdown at midnight Friday.

House Republicans were unable to pass a stop-gap funding measure Thursday that they crafted in response to Trump’s demands. That proposal replaced an original, bipartisan deal that died Wednesday after Trump and his top advisors came out against it.

The bill, which was drafted without consultation with Democrats, failed with 235 members voting against the bill, including 38 Republicans. The measure needed a two-thirds majority to pass under expedited procedures.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., vowed to keep working.

“We will regroup and we will come up with another solution,” Johnson told reporters in the capitol. “So stay tuned.”

That leaves lawmakers with no clear path to prevent a government shutdown that would would take effect days before Christmas. The clash also illustrates the challenges Republicans will likely face for the next two years, attempting to govern with razor-thin majorities and an incoming president who often changes policy demands in real time, and by surprise announcement on social media.

Trump’s demands sink bipartisan deal

The Republican-crafted bill would have funded the government through mid-March, provided money for disaster relief and assistance for farmers, and extend the debt limit until the end of 2027. Raising the debt ceiling was something Trump demanded Wednesday while trashing the bipartisan agreement.

But dozens of Republicans voted against the proposal over high spending levels. Critics also cited that lawmakers only had an hour and a half to read the bill before voting.

"To take this bill yesterday and congratulate yourself because its shorter in pages but increases the debt by 5 trillion dollars is asinine," said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Tx.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said Trump and Johnson spoke over the phone today to work through problems.

“I feel bad for Speaker Johnson but I do think today, once they sat down and talked through it, I believe that the speaker made a convincing case that what we had was a pretty good bill," Bacon told reporters Thursday night. "What we took away from the president is the debt ceiling's his number one priority. It would have been helpful to know that two or three or four weeks ago.”

Nearly all Democrats also opposed the bill, given that it removed several key policy wins they had secured in the original bipartisan deal. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called the proposal “laughable.”

The bill’s failure sends lawmakers back to the drawing board. After the vote, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement: “It’s a good thing the bill failed in the House. And now it's time to go back to the bipartisan agreement, we came to.”

“Speaker Musk?”

Elon Musk, one of Trump’s newest lieutenants, spearheaded the social media campaign against the bipartisan deal on X, the platform he owns, even before Trump himself came out against it. The maneuver spoke to how much power Musk — the richest man in the world — now yields in the GOP broadly and with Trump specifically. Musk’s X bio now reads: “The people voted for major government reform.”

The meltdown also exposed how politically vulnerable Speaker Mike Johnson remains as he approaches a consequential Jan. 3 House floor vote to become the chamber's leader again. Already at least one Republican, Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky, says he plans to oppose Johnson leaving almost no room for further defections and raising the specter of a U.S. House once again thrown into chaos if the GOP cannot elect a speaker because the chamber cannot function without first electing its constitutionally-mandated leader.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., went so far as to suggest Thursday on X that House Republicans should elect Musk as speaker next year — a politically possible but largely preposterous notion even if the Constitution technically allows for a speaker to not be a member of Congress. Paul said there would be “joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka ‘uniparty,’ lose their ever lovin’ minds.”

The Trump-Musk gambit also ignored the reality in the Senate, where any deal to keep the government open requires some element of bipartisan support for it to pass as Democrats still control the chamber. It also provides a preview of the coming budget conflicts in the next Congress, where Republicans will take control but still require Democratic support to pass the 12 annual appropriations bills–which Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are already combing through to find spending cuts to domestic programs as part of their mandate under Trump's incoming Department of Government Efficiency.

The government will begin shutdown operations at midnight Friday, but it would take weeks for the full effect of a shutdown to be felt by everyday Americans. One thing is certain: shutdowns are a bad deal for taxpayers. They don’t save any money and the shutdowns of recent years have cost billions in lost productivity.

Copyright 2024, NPR