House Passes Last-Minute Funding Bill To Avert Shutdown

The Republican-led House of Representatives voted to pass a continuing resolution (CR) on Friday night just hours before a government shutdown.

The stopgap bill was the House’s third attempt at passing a package to fund the government this week. The CR passed 366-34. All 34 opposed to the bill were Republicans while Democrats voted in complete support of the stopgap measure. The bill now heads to the Democrat-controlled Senate, and then to the desk of President Joe Biden, who has signaled support for its passage.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called the bill a “necessary step to bridge the gap to put us into that moment where we can put our fingerprints on the final decisions on spending for 2025.”

Included in the spending bill is $10 billion in funding for disaster relief and billions more in farm aid. A debt limit increase, which was a demand of President-elect Donald Trump, was not included in the package, POLITICO reported. The Hill reported that instead of a debt ceiling increase, Republicans agreed to increase the borrowing limit by $1.5 trillion in exchange for a $2.5 trillion spending cut, which will be done through a reconciliation package in the next Congress when Republicans have control of both chambers and the White House.

The bill was approved by Trump ally Elon Musk, who, along with the president-elect, slammed the first proposed spending package earlier this week.

“The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” Musk wrote on X. “It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces. Ball should now be in the Dem court.”

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Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) said that the Senate will take up the CR Friday before the midnight deadline, according to The Hill.

The first spending plan was a 1,547-page stopgap bill negotiated between the GOP-led House and Democrat-controlled Senate on Tuesday night. But with the help of Musk, Trump pushed back against that bill, which forced Speaker Johnson to come back with a much shorter revised bill on Thursday.

Nearly 40 Republicans and almost every Democrat in the House opposed Johnson’s revised bill, which failed in a vote on Thursday. Most Republican criticism focused on how the bill would extend the debt ceiling suspension for another two years beyond January of next year when the current suspension is slated to expire. Trump addressed the controversy over the debt ceiling in a late-night Truth Social post, writing, “Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”