Trump Transition Live Updates: House Voting on Republicans’ Last-Minute Plan to Avert Shutdown
Where Things Stand
House members are voting on a new proposal to avert a shutdown, a day after President-elect Donald J. Trump torpedoed a spending deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson had struck with Democrats. The plan would tie an extension of government funding to a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit, as Mr. Trump has sought. He quickly embraced the new plan, but it seemed unlikely to pass as all Democrats came out against it. Read more ›
The bill prompted a heated debate on the House floor. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called the proposal “laughable.” Some Republicans were also not on board. Chip Roy, Republican congressman from Texas, said it was “asinine.” If a spending deal is not passed, government funding lapses at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
Mr. Trump publicly turned against the bipartisan deal after the billionaire Elon Musk opposed it, spread disinformation about its terms and vowed political retribution against its supporters. Mr. Musk and his longtime business rival Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest man, were said to have dined with Mr. Trump on Wednesday. Read more ›
Reporting from the Capitol
Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday produced a new plan to avert a shutdown after President-elect Donald J. Trump torpedoed a spending deal he had struck with Democrats, moving to tie an extension of government funding to a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit as Mr. Trump demanded.
It was unclear whether the measure could win a majority in the House, where ultraconservative lawmakers quickly balked at increasing the government’s borrowing limit and Democrats were still livid at the demise of their original compromise plan. The proposal was the latest bid by the embattled Mr. Johnson to find a way to keep federal funding flowing past a Friday night deadline.
Like the original bipartisan deal, the bill would extend government funding at current levels through mid-March, and provide $100 billion in disaster aid, according to a person familiar with it who described it in advance of its release. It would also extend the expiring farm bill for a year, but it omits an array of other policy changes that had been included in the initial deal.
But by far the biggest change was the addition of a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling, a measure that Mr. Trump had insisted Republicans include in any spending measure — and a step that many G.O.P. lawmakers have traditionally been loath to support.
As details of the 116-page plan trickled out on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump threw his support behind it, calling it a “very good Deal for the American People.”
“All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country, and vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Mr. Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
At least one right-wing House Republican, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, quickly came out in opposition, saying he would not vote to increase the debt limit without also winning spending cuts.
“It’s a watered-down version of the same crappy bill people were mad about yesterday,” Mr. Roy said on “The Sean Hannity Show.”
The deal was announced after Mr. Johnson spent the day huddling in his office at the Capitol with lawmakers, searching for an alternative to a slew of untenable options.
Mr. Trump effectively killed the huge bipartisan deal, loaded with unrelated policy changes, that the speaker negotiated to fund the government through mid-March. That plan would have drawn substantial votes from Democrats, but a Republican revolt over it fueled by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk sapped it of even the modest G.O.P. support it would have needed to pass the House.
But he was stuck with a demand from the president-elect that Republicans pair a stripped-down government funding bill with a measure raising the debt ceiling or getting rid of it altogether. That idea is largely unpopular with a number of Republicans, like Mr. Roy, though it remained unclear whether other conservatives would swallow their objections in the face of Mr. Trump’s call to action.
House Democrats were meeting Thursday afternoon to decide how to proceed. But earlier on Thursday, they were openly furious that Republicans had jettisoned their agreement.
“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It’s laughable,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters on his way into the closed-door meeting. “Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”
Mr. Johnson’s plan to avert a shutdown imploded on Wednesday amid a backlash by G.O.P. lawmakers that was driven in part by Mr. Musk, who spent much of the day trashing the measure on social media and threatening the political future of any Republican who supported it.
Then Mr. Trump weighed in, insisting that Republicans not only reject Mr. Johnson’s plan, which connected the government funding measure with $100 billion in disaster aid and an array of policy changes, but also raise or terminate the debt limit.
The borrowing limit is expected to be reached sometime in January — though many think it could be stretched into the spring — and a failure to increase it would cause a default on the nation’s debt. Mr. Trump acknowledged that he did not want to shoulder the responsibility for doing so.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great,” Mr. Trump said in a statement, “but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”
That demand has greatly complicated the path forward. Many Republicans strongly oppose raising the debt limit. Some have refused to do so at all, and others have agreed to raise it only after extracting steep spending cuts.
The last time Mr. Trump forced a government shutdown, in 2018 in a dispute over funding for a wall at the nation’s southern border, Congress had already passed bills funding three-quarters of the federal government, including the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments.
This time, Congress has not passed any individual spending bills to fund the government into next year, meaning if lawmakers did not act before the Saturday morning deadline, the entire government would shut down. Unable to come to any real consensus on spending levels since negotiating two huge bills in March, Congress has been passing stopgap bill after stopgap bill ever since to keep the government from careening into a shutdown.
The 2018 shutdown sidelined roughly 800,000 of the federal government’s 2.1 million employees for 34 days.
In the case of a shutdown, large numbers of postal workers and Transportation Security Administration employees could be forced to work without pay. Benefits such as Medicare and Social Security continue uninterrupted because they are authorized by Congress in separate laws that do not need to be renewed every year.
The blowup could not have come at a worse time for Mr. Johnson, who is hoping to be re-elected as speaker on Jan. 3. Mr. Trump on Wednesday night issued a veiled threat to him over the imperiled stopgap spending bill, telling Fox News Digital that the speaker will be “easily” re-elected to the role next year if he does what Mr. Trump wants.
Asked in a telephone interview on Thursday whether he still had confidence in Mr. Johnson, Mr. Trump told NBC News, “We’ll see,” adding that the spending deal he negotiated was “unacceptable.”
At the same time, the speaker’s handling of the deal has left a number of conservatives openly mulling whether to support him in a vote on the House floor early next year, when he can afford only a few G.O.P. defections to win the necessary majority to keep his gavel. At least one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who led the charge to oust Mr. Johnson earlier this year, has said he will not vote for him for speaker.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said in a statement on X: “Johnson needs to stop the same failed pattern of making dirty swamp deals behind closed doors and keeping everyone in the dark. Republicans need to be working together to deliver the mandate. That requires big changes in behavior.”
Maya C. Miller contributed reporting.
Several senators have crossed over to the House side of the Capitol to watch the spectacle of the vote about to take place.
“It’s more exciting over here,” said Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, as he walked toward the House chamber. Additional sightings included Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, and Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont.
Chip Roy, the Republican congressman from Texas, is lecturing his colleagues for claiming to care about the debt while voting to rack up more. “To take this bill and congratulate yourself because it’s shorter in pages, but increases the debt by $5 trillion, is asinine. That’s precisely what Republicans are doing.”
He says he is “absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility” but supports this legislation.
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After the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, called the Republicans' last-minute plan to avoid a government shutdown “the Musk-Johnson proposal,” Elon Musk took to his social platform, X, to push back on the idea that he’s calling the shots. “I’m not the author of this proposal,” Musk wrote, crediting President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson.
House G.O.P. appropriators — the lawmakers on the House's panel that controls federal spending — now have the unenviable task of making a case for this legislation, which seems all but certain to fail on the House floor ahead of the vote. “We’ve got many needs and necessary reasons to keep our government functioning,” said Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. “The American people are counting on us.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican seen as a more moderate member of her conference, met on Thursday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is hoping to become health secretary in the next Trump administration. She told CNN earlier this week that she planned to press Kennedy on his anti-vaccine activism. A spokesman for Murkowski, Joe Plesha, said that she was keeping the contents of the meeting private.
The meeting could be critical for Kennedy’s chances. Republicans will hold a 53-47 majority, meaning that if all Democrats vote against him, Kennedy can only lose three Republican votes.
Democrats are questioning whether President-elect Donald J. Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson truly control their party, or whether they’ve ceded that influence to unelected outsiders like Musk.
“Is Elon Musk the new dictator of the Republican Party?” asked Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTDemocrats emerged from their closed-door meeting and told reporters they were “united” in voting against the Republicans’ new proposal.
Without Democratic support, and with a few Republicans already pledging to vote down the measure, Johnson’s bill, which would need a two-thirds-majority to pass, appears to be dead on arrival. The House will vote on it within the next hour.
There wasn't much optimism about the fate of this bill from one House Republican. “I have a feeling it’s going to fail spectacularly,” Representative Rich McCormick of Georgia said, calling the legislation “horrible.”
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, told Democrats inside their closed-door meeting on Johnson’s new spending bill, “I’m not simply a no, I’m a hell no.”
On his way into the closed-door meeting with his fellow party members, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland lamented to reporters that an unelected figure like Elon Musk could persuade House Republicans to blow up a delicately negotiated agreement. “It’s just horrific that they have thrust us into this kind of chaos already, and they haven’t even taken over,” said Raskin, who will be the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee next year.
“Who is our leader, Hakeem Jeffries, supposed to negotiate with?” Raskin said, exasperated. “Is it Mike Johnson? Is he the speaker of the House? Or is it Donald Trump? Or is it Elon Musk? Or is it somebody else?”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTDemocrats in the closed-door meeting were overheard applauding loudly and shouting, “Hell no!” — presumably in response to the newly released Republican spending bill.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called the proposal “laughable” on his way into a closed-door meeting where House Democrats will decide whether or not to support Republicans’ latest spending pitch. He derided the proposal as “not serious” and suggested that House Speaker Mike Johnson had reached it with Elon Musk. “Extreme Maga Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown,” he said.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, previously said he opposed Trump’s push to raise the debt ceiling, and many Republicans have voiced discomfort with it as well. It is not yet clear if the proposal that House Republican leaders plan to offer would have the votes to pass in the House or the Democratic-led Senate. (The debt limit is suspended until Jan. 1.)
In a statement on social media, President-elect Donald J. Trump threw his support behind the proposal to be put forward by Republican leaders, urging “All Republicans, and even the Democrats” to vote for the bill tonight.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHouse Republican leaders are putting forward a new plan to avert a government shutdown. That measure, as described by a person familiar with the proposal, would keep government funding flowing at current levels through March 14, extend the farm bill for one year, add disaster aid and suspend the debt ceiling for two years.
One Republican leaving Johnson’s office, Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, said she believes House Republican leaders want to vote on the proposal as early as 6 p.m.
It’s unclear how many Republican defections that plan might pick up. Representative Chip Roy of Texas already voiced opposition to it, saying he was opposed to raising the debt ceiling without also winning spending cuts.
“It’s a water-downed version of the same crappy bill people were mad about yesterday,” Roy said on the Sean Hannity Show.
As House Speaker Mike Johnson searches for a still-elusive solution out of a shutdown, he has spent the day in his office in the Capitol meeting with an array of House Republicans. Vice President-elect JD Vance has been in and out of the meetings.
President-elect Donald J. Trump had dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Wednesday with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the world’s two richest men and longtime business rivals who have cultivated relationships with the president-elect, according to two people briefed on the get-together.
Mr. Musk, who along with Mr. Trump was instrumental in tanking a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over the holidays, was not initially expected to be part of the dinner but joined as it was underway. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private dinner.
Mr. Musk, who is worth more than $450 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, and Mr. Bezos, who is worth about $240 billion, are among a string of tech billionaires who have flocked to Mr. Trump’s Florida estate. Mr. Musk was a crucial supporter of Mr. Trump’s bid for the presidency and is helping to lead a government cost-cutting effort for him, and Mr. Bezos’ Amazon said last week it was giving $1 million to the committee planning Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Mr. Bezos, who founded both Amazon and Blue Origin and also owns The Washington Post, said at a New York Times DealBook conference this month that he was optimistic about Mr. Trump’s return to the White House and that he has seen signs of a “calmer” president-elect.
Mr. Trump has basked in the glow of those who once criticized him or kept him at a distance rushing to forge relationships with him. Mr. Trump targeted Mr. Bezos from 2016 to 2020 over everything from headlines in The Post to Amazon’s tax payments.
“The first term, everybody was fighting me,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference on Monday. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Mr. Bezos has also clashed with Mr. Musk. His rocket company, Blue Origin, will compete in the years ahead with Mr. Musk’s SpaceX for government contracts worth billions.
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The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, isn’t biting on the new push by President-elect Donald J. Trump to raise the federal debt limit as part of a short-term government funding package. Posting on Bluesky, the social media alternative to Elon Musk’s X, Jeffries accused Republicans of wanting to increase the debt ceiling so they could slash Social Security benefits, an apparent reference to Trump's plan for a massive tax cut that Democrats contend would lead to entitlement cuts. “Hard pass,” Jeffries wrote.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to run the Health and Human Services Department, visited Capitol Hill on Thursday for a fourth straight day of meetings with Senate Republicans, who have pressed him on his commitment to their anti-abortion agenda but so far offered little resistance to his candidacy.
In a sign of the friendly reception Mr. Kennedy has received this week, Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, a physician, said Thursday that he had formed a “Make America Healthy Again” caucus — an ode to the slogan Mr. Kennedy has used to describe his broad agenda focused on food policy and chronic disease. Mr. Kennedy had endorsed the group, Mr. Marshall’s office said.
The caucus appeared to be an effort to institutionalize Mr. Kennedy’s influence in Congress, similarly to the recently formed DOGE caucus, a reference to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting project overseen by the billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Mr. Marshall’s announcement said the group, which includes Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, would focus on nutrition, improving primary care and “addressing the root causes of chronic diseases.”
Mr. Kennedy’s visits to Capitol Hill this week have led to the impression that he is on a glide path to confirmation, with Republicans set to hold 53 seats in the next Congress.
But he has yet to meet with some members of the conference who could approach him more skeptically, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor who is set to lead the Senate health committee next year.
Mr. Kennedy met on Thursday with Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a moderate Republican who has vowed to press Mr. Kennedy on his anti-vaccine activism. Joe Plesha, a spokesman for Ms. Murkowski, said that she planned to keep the contents of the meeting private. That strategy was a departure from most of the Republicans Mr. Kennedy saw this week, who posted supportive photos and statements on X soon after their sessions with him.
Mr. Kennedy told reporters this week that he might meet in January with Democratic members of the Senate.
Alan Rappeport covers the Treasury Department and has reported on debt limit fights during the Trump and Biden administrations.
President-elect Donald J. Trump injected debt limit politics into already-fraught congressional spending talks this week, urging lawmakers to lift the debt limit or abolish it entirely before he takes office next month.
The re-emergence of the debt limit comes 18 months after Republicans and Democrats staved off a fiscal crisis and agreed to suspend a cap on how much the government can borrow until after the 2024 presidential election. That was supposed to clear the decks and sidestep a politically difficult vote during the heat of campaign season.
But now the problem is waiting for Mr. Trump. As he prepares to push an agenda of tax cuts and border security, Mr. Trump fears that a debt limit fight next year could interfere. His plans are expected to cost trillions of dollars, much of which will most likely need to come from borrowed funds. A drawn-out debt limit fight next year could force Mr. Trump and Republicans to bow to the demands of Democrats and could consume the congressional calendar.
“This is a nasty TRAP set in place by the Radical Left Democrats!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Wednesday night.
Republicans are always reluctant to lift the debt limit, particularly when a Democrat is in the White House, saying it enables runaway spending. G.O.P. lawmakers regularly use it as a tool to extract concessions, such as spending cuts, from Democrats when they are in power.
But Republicans will soon control Congress, as well as the White House, putting the onus squarely on them to either deal with the debt limit or face the prospect of a default. The standoff over the debt limit last year roiled markets and led to a downgrade of the long-term credit rating of the United States. Mr. Trump would like to avoid a similar scenario on his watch.
By addressing the debt limit during the final weeks of the Biden administration, Republicans could prevent Democrats from weaponizing it against them once they are in power. And, as Mr. Trump has made clear, he could then blame Mr. Biden for increasing the borrowing cap.
“It’s clear Trump wants to clear the deck so he doesn’t have to have a budget/debt limit showdown on his watch to clean up the mess from the Biden spending sprees,” said Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist who has been an adviser to Mr. Trump.
But it is far from certain that Democrats would go along with the plan, given that they have already blasted Mr. Trump’s push to extend all of the 2017 tax cuts and enact new ones.
Democrats have long criticized Republicans for playing dangerous games with the debt limit, and called for it to be abolished. But it is not clear how willing they might be to let go of it as a potential source of leverage. And while Mr. Trump has indicated that he is willing to spearhead a move to eliminate the debt limit, many Republicans might fear that following his lead would be fiscally reckless.
What is the debt limit?
The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the United States is authorized to borrow to fund the government and meet its financial obligations.
Because the federal government runs budget deficits — meaning it spends more than it brings in through taxes and other revenue — it must borrow huge sums of money to pay its bills. Those obligations include funding for social safety net programs, interest on the national debt and salaries for members of the armed forces.
Approaching the debt ceiling often elicits calls by lawmakers to cut back on government spending. But lifting the debt limit does not actually authorize any new spending — in fact, it simply allows the United States to spend money on programs that have already been authorized by Congress.
When will the debt limit be reached?
After a protracted fight, lawmakers agreed in June 2023 to suspend the $31.4 trillion debt limit until Jan. 1, 2025.
On that day, the limit would have to be increased by the amount of debt that has been incurred since the suspension — about $5 trillion. If it is not lifted or suspended again, the Treasury secretary will then have to use “extraordinary measures” to ensure that the United States pays its bills, including interest payments to investors who have bought government debt. Those payments are essential to preventing the United States from defaulting on its debt.
It is not yet clear how long the Treasury secretary will be able to use extraordinary measures, which temporarily curb certain government investments so that the bills can continue to be paid. However, it is expected that the so-called X-date would come sometime in the middle of next year.
“The summer could be a period that we zero in on as an X-date time frame,” said Shai Akabas, the executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Economic Policy Program, adding that natural disasters or new legislation passed early next year could bring that date forward.
How could the debt limit complicate Trump’s agenda?
Republicans will soon control the White House, the Senate and the House, but with narrow majorities. That means Republican lawmakers will have to work with Democrats on most legislation to find enough votes for passage.
That is what happened during Mr. Trump’s first term, when Republicans controlled Congress but were reluctant to raise the debt limit. Mr. Trump was trying to force Democrats to fund his proposed border wall, threatening a government shutdown as a debt limit deadline approached.
Ultimately, he had to rely on Democrats, who drove a tough bargain over his demands, and he broke with his party to strike a deal with Democrats. Republicans were frustrated at the time over an agreement that included disaster relief money and a debt limit increase without including many of their policy priorities.
The machinations over the debt limit distracted Republican efforts to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, although lawmakers ultimately pushed it through at the end of 2017.
Republicans most likely want to avoid another paralyzing event this time around as they determine which of their many priorities they want to push through first. They are still deciding whether to first focus on extending the 2017 tax cuts next year, which is estimated to cost $4 trillion over 10 years, or to prioritize border security legislation.
They will need the votes of Democrats to deal with the debt limit, and a long standoff could hobble their ability to get other things done.
Abolish the debt limit?
One idea that Mr. Trump floated this week was to do away with the debt limit entirely.
According to the Constitution, Congress must authorize government borrowing. In the early 20th century, the debt limit was instituted so that the Treasury would not need to ask Congress for permission each time it had to issue debt to pay bills.
During World War I, Congress passed the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 to give the Treasury more flexibility to issue debt and manage federal finances. The debt limit started to take its current shape in 1939, when Congress consolidated different limits that had been set on different types of bonds into a single borrowing cap.
But the drama surrounding the debt limit has led to bipartisan calls for it to be ended. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen in 2021 called the debt limit “destructive” and said it should be eliminated. Her predecessor, Steven T. Mnuchin, expressed similar sentiments in 2017 when he described it as a “somewhat ridiculous concept” that does not limit spending.
Mr. Trump previously suggested that the borrowing cap was not necessary and said this week that the “Debt Ceiling guillotine” should be either extended or terminated before he takes office.
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Michael D. ShearAnnie KarniRyan Mac and Maggie Haberman
Michael D. Shear, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman reported from Washington. Ryan Mac reported from Los Angeles.
When President-elect Donald J. Trump picked “the Great Elon Musk,” the world’s richest man, to slash government spending and waste, he mused that the effort might be “the Manhattan Project of our time.”
By Thursday, that prediction looked spot on. Wielding the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill.
In more than 150 separate posts on X, starting before dawn on Wednesday, Mr. Musk demanded that Republicans back away from a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. He vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called Mr. Musk on Wednesday to ask that he stop posting about the bill.
Mr. Musk also shared misinformation about the bill, including false claims that it contained new aid for Ukraine or $3 billion in funds for a new stadium in Washington. By the end of Wednesday, Mr. Trump issued a statement of his own, calling the bill “a betrayal of our country.”
It was a remarkable moment for Mr. Musk, who has never been elected to public office but now appears to be the largest megaphone for the man about to retake the Oval Office. Larger, in fact, than Mr. Trump himself, whose own vaunted social media presence is dwarfed by that of Mr. Musk. The president-elect has 96.2 million followers on X, while Mr. Musk has 207.9 million. (Mr. Musk is also far richer than Mr. Trump. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he is worth $458 billion, while the president-elect is worth a mere $6.61 billion.)
This week also marked the first time Mr. Musk has been able to use his website as a digital whip, driving lawmakers to support his desired outcome.
His actions had prompted a backlash from some lawmakers who recoiled at his interference in the legislative process. Some even accused him of acting more like the president or vice president than a billionaire executive.
“Democrats and Republicans spent months negotiating a bipartisan agreement to fund our government,” Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who has long criticized the power of wealthy business executives, wrote on X. “The richest man on Earth, President Elon Musk, doesn’t like it. Will Republicans kiss the ring? Billionaires must not be allowed to run our government.”
Representative Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Agriculture Committee, told reporters that he “didn’t see where Musk has a voting card.”
Mr. Trump sought to reclaim control of the political debate for himself on Thursday morning, issuing a threat of sorts to Mr. Johnson that he must not give in to Democrats as he tries to find a way to keep the government operating without incurring the wrath of Mr. Musk.
“If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump endorsed a new effort by Mr. Johnson to avoid a government shutdown with a spending plan that suspends the nation’s debt limit for two years. In a social media post, the president-elect wrote that “all Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country, and vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!”
Mr. Trump has tasked Mr. Musk to rein in an out-of-control bureaucracy when he named him to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire. Both men are among a string of tech billionaires who have flocked to Mr. Trump’s Florida estate in recent weeks to cultivate their relationships with the president-elect.
Mr. Trump dined with Mr. Musk and Jeff Bezos, the world’s two richest men, at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday night, as Mr. Musk’s posts were roiling Washington. Mr. Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder who also owns The Washington Post, recently gave $1 million to the committee planning Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Mr. Musk was not initially expected to be part of the dinner but joined as it was underway, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private dinner.
Many House Republicans have been left deeply frustrated by Mr. Musk’s involvement in spending negotiations and legitimately concerned about his threat to find primary challengers to take on any lawmakers who vote for a spending bill he doesn’t like. Lawmakers said they were alarmed and that they have never seen a donor outwardly exact so much influence on policy after his preferred candidate won an election.
They are also stuck taking their cues from Mr. Musk’s social media feeds, where he is promoting members who are in agreement with him. Despite his occasional presence on the Hill and in his role leading DOGE, Mr. Musk does not interact directly with many members of Congress. Mr. Ramaswamy has been the one talking directly with them.
On the House floor on Thursday, lawmakers were fuming that Mr. Musk is not a member of Congress and is exerting too much influence on their proceedings.
Mr. Thompson, who was deeply involved in negotiating direct payments for farmers that are now effectively dead because of Mr. Musk, added, “I’m not sure he understands the plight of the normal working people right now.”
As their offices were flooded with calls, appropriators and lawmakers from rural areas were livid that Mr. Musk had spent the day posting on social media to effectively kill the bill. Members were glued to his nonstop feed as they walked to and from votes, and some privately expressed concerns about their own political futures if he went through with his threats.
Conservative Republicans, however, rallied behind Mr. Musk’s barrage of posts.
Representative Andy Barr, Republican of Kentucky, told Fox News that “this is exactly what the American people voted for when they voted for Donald Trump.”
After Mr. Musk threatened on X to “vote out” any member who voted for the spending bill, Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina cheered. “In five years in Congress, I’ve been awaiting a fundamental change in the dynamic,” he wrote online. “It has arrived.”
Some Republicans even went so far as to suggest that the party should replace Mr. Johnson with Mr. Musk as speaker, noting that speaker candidates don’t have to be a sitting member of Congress to win the gavel.
“I’d be open to supporting @elonmusk for Speaker of the House,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote on social media. She added: “The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way.”
That kind of lavish praise could come back to haunt Mr. Musk, though people close to Mr. Trump say there is no evidence of any kind of a rift between the president-elect and his richest supporter.
Still, the president-elect gets famously irritable when the people in his orbit outshine him. Steve Bannon, once the chief strategist in the White House during his first term, abruptly departed after journalists focused attention on the power and influence he wielded. (One “Saturday Night Live” skit several weeks into his presidency featured Mr. Bannon as the Grim Reaper standing behind the president and calling the shots in the Oval Office.)
One of Mr. Musk’s first posts about the spending bill came at 4:15 Wednesday morning in Washington.
“This bill should not pass,” the billionaire wrote on his social platform.
Between posts about his own video game antics and SpaceX’s satellite internet service, he used his X account to call the bill “criminal,” spread misinformation about its contents and issue a rallying cry to “stop the steal of your tax dollars!”
His posts followed a similar pattern of past activity on X, where he can become hyper-fixated on a single issue that bothers him. As the most popular user on X, Mr. Musk has used his feed as a bullhorn to drive conversation on the platform and beyond.
By Wednesday afternoon, House representatives and senators — some of whom had already voiced their disapproval of the bill before Mr. Musk’s outbursts — were falling in line.
“Any Member who claims to support the @DOGE should not support this “CR of Inefficiency” that does not have offsets!!,” Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican from South Carolina, wrote on X, using shorthand for a continuing resolution to keep federal funding flowing. “Don’t get weak in the knees before we even get started!”
On Wednesday, narrative eclipsed truth. “The terrible bill is dead,” Mr. Musk posted just before 4 p.m. in Washington, closing his post with the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
He has used the refrain before, most notably when restoring Mr. Trump’s Twitter account in November 2022, shortly after buying the company. This time, the man who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars this election cycle to support Mr. Trump’s campaign used it to frame his own actions as the will of American citizens.
“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan. 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office,” Mr. Musk wrote on X. “None. Zero.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the representative from Georgia who wrote a social media post referring to Elon Musk. She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, not Green.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Trump has already made clear he wants the debt ceiling raised now, and that he wants a number of Democratic priorities tucked into the current bill removed. The bill had bipartisan agreement until Trump and Musk began rallying Republicans against it.
President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Fox News Digital on Thursday about the House speaker, Mike Johnson, saying he will “easily” be re-elected to the role next year — if he does what Trump wants to see happen with the spending bill.
“If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump said.
The comments from Trump are a veiled threat to Johnson to do exactly what the incoming president wants, or lose his post. Trump holds enormous sway with most House Republicans.
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Reporting from Washington
President-elect Donald J. Trump denounced a bipartisan spending deal that would fund the government until mid-March, telling Republican lawmakers that it would be “suicidal” to vote for it. His intervention all but buried the agreement with government funding scheduled to lapse in less than two days.
Mr. Trump’s criticism of the legislation, delivered in a series of social media posts on Wednesday, fueled a conservative revolt that had already been underway against the spending measure. His broadside left the measure on life support in the House, as he demanded major changes to the deal that threw negotiations to avoid a government shutdown into chaos.
Here’s what to know:
What happens next
Congress has until Friday night to come up with and pass a bill that can clear the Republican-led House and the Democratic-controlled Senate and be signed by President Biden before government funding lapses at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. It is unclear what form a new agreement would take.
Speaker Mike Johnson had planned to bring up the compromise bill under a fast-track process that requires a two-thirds majority for passage, relying on Democrats and a smaller group of Republicans to push it through. Now he must cobble together a majority some other way.
Some Republicans said Mr. Johnson was mulling shearing the legislation of a variety of unrelated measures that had been included and putting just the spending extension to a vote. But Democrats would be unlikely to support such a bill. They said Wednesday night that they were in no mood to negotiate a second deal after Mr. Trump directed Republicans to tank the one Mr. Johnson agreed to.
“House Republicans have now unilaterally decided to break a bipartisan agreement that they made,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on Wednesday evening.
And some House Republicans are unwilling to vote for catchall spending measures, meaning that Democratic support will probably be needed to get any extension through the chamber. The demands Mr. Trump laid out for the legislation also further complicated the negotiations.
What Trump wants
In his social media posts, Mr. Trump called for removing everything from the spending bill but the funding extension, characterizing the many policy add-ons as “DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS” even though Republicans agreed to all of them.
He also demanded that the spending agreement address the debt ceiling so that the government borrowing limit would be increased while President Biden was in office, absolving him and Republicans of responsibility for doing so.
That demand was an acknowledgment of the challenges Mr. Trump and Republican leaders are likely to face trying to wrangle a thin Republican majority in Congress to approve an increase in the national debt, something that many in the party have long refused to do.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” Mr. Trump said on social media, adding that Democrats “are looking to embarrass us in June when it comes up for a Vote.” Any Republican who “would be so stupid” as to vote for a spending bill that didn’t also immediately eliminate or raise the debt ceiling, Mr. Trump said, would face a primary challenge.
What’s in the bill
The spending legislation that had been hammered out by congressional leaders this week would extend funding of the government at current levels until the middle of March, averting a government shutdown until after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, when Republicans would also be in control of a new Congress.
But by the time the agreement had been unveiled to lawmakers, the bill was filled with a number of unrelated measures, including $100 billion in new disaster aid, $10 billion in additional economic assistance to farmers; changes in health, energy and foreign investment policies; a pay raise for members of Congress; and a provision granting a stadium site in the nation’s capital for the Washington Commanders football team.
Republican lawmakers had already begun to balk at the details of the 1,547-page spending package before Mr. Trump intervened, explicitly threatening Republicans who might support the bill with political retribution.
Elon Musk, the billionaire Mr. Trump has put in charge of a sweeping initiative to scale back government and slash spending, spent Wednesday attacking the legislation on X, his social media platform, and exhorting G.O.P. lawmakers to oppose it.
Reporting from Ottawa
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday took credit for a new border security plan — that was announced by Canada.
A day earlier, the Canadian government outlined a plan costing roughly $1.3 billion Canadian dollars, about $903 million, to fortify its border with the United States. Canada has presented the plan to the incoming Trump administration.
“President Trump is securing the border and he hasn’t even taken office yet,” said a news release from Mr. Trump’s transition team.
“Facing an uproar among his own citizens,” the release continued, “embattled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just announced a billion-dollar plan for major border security improvements and increased border patrols.”
Canada’s proposal includes the use of drones, helicopters and other technology to watch over the 5,525-mile border, as well as canine units to check for drugs.
The plan follows Mr. Trump’s threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods soon after he takes office next month if the country doesn’t do more to stop the flow of undocumented migrants and drugs into the United States.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Trump continued with his mockery of Mr. Trudeau and Canada’s sovereignty in a social media post, while also airing his longstanding trade complaints.
“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year?” Mr. Trump wrote. “Makes no sense! Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!”
It is unclear where Mr. Trump came up with that figure.
As of October, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. trade deficit with Canada was about $50 billion. The largest export by value from Canada is crude oil, and the United States generally has a trade surplus with Canada if oil is excluded.
After an earlier reference by Mr. Trump to Canada as a U.S. state with Mr. Trudeau as its governor, Canadian officials said similar comments were made during Mr. Trump’s first time in office and characterized them as humorous remarks.
Mr. Trudeau has not said anything publicly in response to Mr. Trump’s attempts to poke fun at him.
No opinion poll in Canada has shown strong support for joining the United States, but polling has found that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular.
Last month, Mr. Trudeau and several officials flew to Florida to discuss the border and tariffs over dinner with Mr. Trump.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA bipartisan spending deal to avert a shutdown was on life support on Wednesday after President-elect Donald J. Trump condemned it, leaving lawmakers without a strategy to fund the government past a Friday night deadline.
Mr. Trump issued a scathing statement ordering Republicans not to support the sprawling bill, piling on to a barrage of criticism from Elon Musk, who spent Wednesday trashing the measure on social media and threatening any Republican who supported it with political ruin.
It was not yet clear how Speaker Mike Johnson planned to proceed as the package, which was stuffed full of unrelated policy measures as well as tens of billions of dollars in disaster and agricultural aid, appeared to be hemorrhaging support. Some Republicans suggested he was mulling stripping the bill of everything but the spending extension and putting it to a vote, but the fate of such a measure was also very much in doubt.
The blowback from Republicans to the agreement underscored the complications top G.O.P. leaders will have to manage next year when they control all of Congress and face a president with a penchant for blowing up political compromises. It also showed the power of a circle of influential outside players in Mr. Trump’s orbit who appeared willing to punish Republicans if they failed to accede to his wishes.
Even before Mr. Musk began making noise, a swell of Republican lawmakers — both ultraconservatives and some mainstream members — had been furious about the funding measure, which was rolled out on Tuesday night. It began as a simple spending bill to keep government funds flowing past a midnight deadline and into mid-March, but it emerged from bipartisan negotiations laden with $100 billion in disaster aid and dozens of other unrelated policies.
The G.O.P. resistance meant that in order to pass the bill, Mr. Johnson was going to have to rely, yet again, on Democratic votes to pass it, using a special procedure that requires the support of two-thirds of those voting. But by Wednesday afternoon, the backlash to the legislation had spread so far and wide in G.O.P. ranks that it was unclear whether he would even be able to muster a bare minimum of Republicans to partner with Democrats and push it across the finish line.
The bill appeared doomed when Mr. Trump weighed in late Wednesday afternoon, saying lawmakers needed to pass a “temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS,” and said it should be combined with an increase in the debt ceiling, the cap on how much money the United States is authorized to borrow to meet its financial obligations.
“We should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want,” Mr. Trump wrote in a lengthy statement on social media that he issued jointly with Senator JD Vance, the vice president-elect.
They spoke up after Mr. Musk, who Mr. Trump has tapped to scale back the scope of federal government, had gone on a daylong rampage against the bill, posting nearly nonstop on his social media platform X about how lawmakers needed to kill it. He was joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire who is partnering with Mr. Musk on the effort to streamline the government and slash spending.
Republicans gauging support for the legislation said they were bleeding votes as a result of Mr. Musk’s barrage.
“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Mr. Musk wrote in one post.
Mr. Johnson appeared on “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday morning to make a case for the bill, and said he had spoken to Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy earlier in the day.
“They said, ‘It’s not directed to you, Mr. Speaker, but we don’t like the spending,’” Mr. Johnson recounted. “I said, ‘Guess what, fellas, I don’t either. We’ve got to get this done because here’s the key: By doing this, we are clearing the decks, and we are setting up for Trump to come in roaring back with the America First agenda.’”
Even before Mr. Trump got involved, typically reliable Republican votes for stopgap funding measures had begun to balk. Senator John Cornyn of Texas called the bill a “monstrosity.”
And anti-spending conservatives were livid.
“The American people wanted change,” said Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina. “They didn’t say go out and spend more money, put us more into debt. It’s the opposite of what the American people voted for.”
But just as conservative Republicans and Mr. Musk were railing against the bipartisan deal for adding too much spending to the national debt, Mr. Trump called for raising the debt ceiling, insisting that Republicans must increase it as part of the spending package so the borrowing limit would go up while President Biden was still in the White House.
It reflected a recognition by the president-elect that his party would have a difficult time raising the limit next year when they have full control of Congress, and that he would not want to sign such a measure. Many Republicans refuse to back debt ceiling increases, viewing them as politically toxic.
The borrowing limit is expected to be reached sometime in January, and a failure to increase it would cause a default on the nation’s debt. Mr. Trump acknowledged that he did not want to shoulder the responsibility for doing so.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great,” Mr. Trump said in his statement, “but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”
Later, in a separate social media post, he said that any Republican who “would be so stupid” as to vote for a funding extension without raising the debt ceiling “should and will” face a primary challenge.
Democrats, for their part, appeared in no mood to start any new negotiations.
“House Republicans have now unilaterally decided to break a bipartisan agreement that they made,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said on Wednesday evening. “House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt every day Americans all across this country. House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited upon the American people that results from a government shutdown.”
Reporting from Washington
The stopgap spending bill congressional leaders agreed on this week began as a simple funding measure to keep government funds flowing past a Friday night deadline and into early next year, long after House Republicans elect a speaker and President-elect Donald J. Trump is sworn in.
But by the time it was rolled out to lawmakers on Tuesday night, it had transformed into a true Christmas tree of a bill, adorned with all manner of unrelated policy measures in the kind of year-end catchall that Republicans have long derided. It is a 1,547-page behemoth of a package with provisions including foreign investment restrictions, new health care policies and a stadium site for the Washington Commanders.
The package was on life support on Wednesday night as G.O.P. lawmakers balked at its details, a backlash further fueled by a condemnation by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who called it full of “DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS,” and his close ally Elon Musk.
End-of-year spending bills often become magnets for unrelated measures, fueled by last-minute spasms of deal-cutting by lawmakers who recognize it could be their last chance to get something done. That was even more true this year with Democrats bracing for a Republican governing trifecta come January, and Speaker Mike Johnson arriving at the negotiating table sapped of leverage because a large group of his members refuses to vote for any spending measure.
Mr. Johnson had another incentive to allow the package to balloon: He could satisfy some longstanding bipartisan desires with minimal Republican fingerprints, merely blaming a Democratic Senate and White House for any bloat in the deal. He will not have that luxury in a few weeks, when Republicans control all of Congress and Mr. Trump is in the White House.
“We’ve got to get this done because here’s the key: By doing this, we are clearing the decks, and we are setting up for Trump to come in roaring back with the America First agenda,” Mr. Johnson said on “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday morning.
Here are some of the provisions that made it into the bill.
Disaster aid
One of the biggest chunks of funds — and one of the more politically popular — is the aid portion of the legislation, which provides $100 billion for communities ravaged by Hurricanes Milton and Helene and other disasters. Included in that money is $21 billion to help farmers whose crops were ravaged by natural disasters.
The bill also provides full funding for the reconstruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore that collapsed in March.
Payments to farmers
Lawmakers set aside $10 billion in direct economic assistance, available to any farmer who applied for a federal agricultural funding program such as crop insurance, subsidies or disaster assistance in 2024. The aid would be distributed based on how many acres of eligible crops they grow. Proponents argued it was necessary in part because Republicans and Democrats had failed to reach agreement on a new farm bill, leaving subsidy payments at a level set six years ago.
A pay raise for lawmakers
It has been more than a decade since members of Congress have gotten a cost-of-living increase in their salaries. Lawmakers, loath to be seen giving themselves a pay raise while their constituents face economic challenges, have routinely included language in spending bills that exempts them from the wage increases that other federal employees receive.
In a legislative sleight of hand reported earlier by Bloomberg Government, the spending bill’s drafters omitted that provision this time, positioning themselves for a raise of 3.8 percent, or about $6,600 for most members, whose current salary is $174,000.
Some lawmakers have long argued that they should be allowed to receive cost-of-living increases to ensure that average people — not just the ultrawealthy — can afford to serve in Congress. Others have contended that the appearance of self-dealing has made the issue too toxic.
Already one centrist House Democrat, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, who narrowly held his seat in November in his Trump-won district, has said he will oppose the bill because of this measure.
Restrictions on investment in Chinese technology companies
The bill would broaden the scope of restrictions President Biden imposed last year on American investment in key Chinese technology industries, expanding the list of prohibited technologies to include many that could be used in integrated circuits for military, intelligence or mass surveillance purposes.
Child care
Two of the top Democratic appropriators, Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, have worked to shoehorn additional money for child care and early education programs into virtually every major spending bill that Congress considers.
Tucked into this legislation is $250 million in emergency spending to increase access to child care for working families and another $250 million for renovations to child care facilities damaged by natural disasters and temporary child care services in affected areas.
Other measures include:
Allowing E15 ethanol — gasoline blended with 15 percent corn-based ethanol — to be sold year-round.
An additional $25 million to protect the residences of Supreme Court justices.
Requiring vendors selling tickets to “concerts, sports and other large gatherings” to disclose to consumers the total ticket price — including additional fees — at the beginning of a transaction.
Transferring control of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium from the federal government to the District of Columbia, paving the way for the Washington Commanders football team to move their stadium from Maryland to play home games in the nation’s capital.
Criminalizing the publication of “nonconsensual intimate visual depictions,” including deepfake pornography, and requiring social media platforms to have procedures in place to remove the content after being notified by a victim.
Imposing new restrictions on pharmacy benefit managers, the companies hired by employers and government programs like Medicare to negotiate drug prices and oversee prescriptions. The measures would discourage those companies from steering patients toward more expensive drugs.
Throwing out a requirement that lawmakers buy health coverage on an insurance exchange established by the Affordable Care Act and allowing them to get coverage from the traditional federal employee benefits plan.
Adding to the existing responsibilities of the assistant secretary of commerce for travel and tourism the additional mandate of promoting “locations and events in the United States that are important to music tourism.”
Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.
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The House Ethics Committee secretly voted this month to release an investigative report into the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The panel’s vote, which was reported earlier by CNN, paved the way for the release of the report after House members cast the final votes of the Congress this week and have left Washington to return to their districts, two of the people said.
It is an abrupt turnabout for the panel, which had previously declined to release the report. It came less than two weeks after House Republicans banded together to block a Democratic move on the floor to force the release of the report, instead returning the matter to the Ethics Committee for further consideration.
The haggling on Capitol Hill over the report intensified after President-elect Donald J. Trump announced last month that he had chosen Mr. Gaetz to lead the Justice Department, prompting anger and concern among members of both parties on Capitol Hill who were aware of serious allegations against him.
Since the spring of 2021, the Ethics Committee had been investigating Mr. Gaetz over an array of accusations, including that he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and accepted gifts that violated House rules.
Mr. Gaetz has denied the charges.
On Wednesday, he decried the news of the report’s impending release and noted that he had already been investigated by the Justice Department, which brought no charges against him.
“The Biden/Garland DOJ spent years reviewing allegations that I committed various crimes. I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on the social media site X.
The Justice Department made the decision not to prosecute Mr. Gaetz after investigators concluded they could not make a strong enough case against him in court, in part because of a concern that some potential witnesses might not have stood up well under cross-examination, according to people familiar with the case who spoke about it at the time on the condition of anonymity.
In his post on Wednesday, Mr. Gaetz denied some of the central allegations against him, including that he had paid an underage girl for sex and solicited prostitutes, dismissing them as a distortion of youthful indiscretions.
“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated — even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18,” he wrote, adding: “My 30’s were an era of working very hard — and playing hard too. It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”
Mr. Gaetz abruptly resigned after Mr. Trump picked him to be attorney general, prompting House Republican leaders to argue that the Ethics Committee should not release the conclusions of its investigation, since Mr. Gaetz was no longer a member of Congress and therefore outside its jurisdiction.
Mr. Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration in the face of Senate opposition and is now set to join the conservative One America News Network as an anchor in January.
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