The US Senate has approved a stop-gap funding measure to avert a government shutdown shortly after a midnight deadline with a bill that defied Donald Trump’s demand for a debt-limit suspension. The legislation next goes to Joe Biden’s desk for his signature.
The Senate passed the bill in an 85 to 11 vote, hours after an overwhelmingly bipartisan 366-34 vote in the House. It was passed 38 minutes after the deadline but the government did not invoke shutdown procedures in the interim.
The White House said in a statement earlier on Friday that the president supports “moving this legislation forward” and averting a government shutdown days before the Christmas holiday.
Passage of the funding bill, which extends federal funding at current levels through and adds $100bn in disaster aid and $10bn in assistance to farmers, capped a week of turmoil that offered a preview of the internal clashes to come when Trump returns to power on 20 January.
“We’re excited about this outcome,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said after the vote. He said he had spoken with Trump and that the president-elect “was certainly happy about this outcome, as well”.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, called the House’s passage of the government funding bill “a victory for the American people”. In the House vote, Democrats provided more support than Republicans to advance the measure.
“The House Democrats have successfully stopped extreme MAGA Republicans from shutting down the government, crashing the economy and hurting the working class Americans all across the nation,” he said.
A shutdown would have forced thousands of US government workers to be furloughed and could have snarled holiday travel. The last – and longest – federal shutdown happened in December 2018, in Trump’s first term.
Criticism by Trump and one of his top advisors, billionaire Elon Musk, incited a Republican revolt against an earlier funding deal Johnson had struck with Democrats. On Thursday, House Republicans voted down Johnson’s attempt to pass a pared-down spending bill.
The original bipartisan bill had been negotiated by House Republicans and Democrats, but was attacked on Wednesday by Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump. Musk warned that any lawmaker who supported the “outrageous” spending bill “deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”
In response, Johnson, put forward a second version of the bill, a pared-down budget proposal that included a brand-new demand from Trump: a suspension of the debt ceiling. Trump had calculated that suspending limits on the national debt while Biden was still in office would save him a difficult fight in his first few months in the White House.
Democrats decried the new bill as a cover for a tax cut to benefit wealthy backers such as Musk, while creating trillions of dollars in additional debt for the US. Several Republicans also rebelled, outraged by the proposed lifting of government borrowing limits.
The bill failed by a vote of 174-235, a humiliating setback for Trump.
The political drama this week showed that Trump’s grip on the Republican party is not ironclad. The president-elect had furiously urged the package to be passed, including threatening to support primary opposition candidates of Republicans who opposed it.
Earlier on Friday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, launched a blistering attack on Republicans for their handling of the budget crisis. “Republicans blew up this deal – they did – and they need to fix this, period,” she told reporters. “[Republicans need] to stop playing politics with a government shutdown, and … they’re doing the bidding of their billionaire friends, that’s what we’re seeing, at the expense of hardworking Americans.”
While Jean-Pierre didn’t name specific individuals, her comments appear to be referencing Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Democrats mocked the influence of the tech billionaire this week, referring to the interventions of “President Musk”. In a speech on Friday, Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, decried the meddling of the “world’s richest man who no one voted for”, saying it was Musk’s fault that “Congress has been thrown into pandemonium”.
Meanwhile, some Republicans called for Musk to be the next House Speaker, an indictment of Johnson as he tries to hold onto the Speakership next month with a razor-thin majority and dissent in his ranks.
Brushing off the setbacks and criticism, Johnson said after Friday’s vote that he had joked with Musk about wanting the job. Johnson said Musk told him: “This may be the hardest job in the world.”
Musk repeatedly spread misinformation about the bipartisan proposal he helped kill, the AP found. He claimed the plan would have given lawmakers a 40% raise when the maximum possible increase through the proposal was actually 3.8%. Musk also shared a false post claiming the proposal would have given $3bn to a potential new NFL stadium in Washington DC; the bill had a provision to transfer the land of the Washington Commanders stadium from the US government to the District of Columbia, but explicitly stated there would be no associated federal funding.
After the House, Musk posted on X that Johnson “did a good job here, given the circumstances”.
“It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces,” he wrote.
Trump earlier on Friday repeated his demand for the suspension – or even elimination – of the federal borrowing limit – a view that is anathema to conservative fiscal hawks – and insisted any shutdown should happen under Biden’s watch rather than his own upcoming administration.
Without the debt limit provision, Trump now inherits the volatile politics of suspending a cap on how much the government can borrow. Johnson on Friday was optimistic that Republicans would find a way forward next year, at the start of a new era of unified GOP governance.
“Things are going to be very different around here,” he said, adding: “This is a necessary step to bridge the gap to put us in that moment where we can put our fingerprints on the final decisions on spending for 2025.”
