Trump Transition Live Updates: Republicans Search for Path to Avert a Shutdown After Trump Smashes Speaker’s Deal
"Where Things Stand
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s denunciation of a stopgap spending bill has left Republicans without a strategy to fund the government, and Speaker Mike Johnson is grasping for a way to avert a shutdown this weekend. Mr. Trump torpedoed the bipartisan deal Mr. Johnson had struck, leaving him caught between two seemingly untenable options: continue with a bill sapped of Republican support or try to implement Mr. Trump’s demands, which will be a tough sell among Democrats, who still control the Senate, and some Republicans. Read more ›
Mr. Trump publicly turned against the deal after the billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent much of Wednesday railing against the agreement. Mr. Musk, whom Mr. Trump picked to slash government spending as part of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, spread misinformation about the agreement and vowed political retribution against any lawmaker who supports it. Read more ›
There is precious little time to make the major changes Mr. Trump has demanded. Congress has until Friday night to pass a bill through 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. Here’s what to know ›
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.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday was toiling to find a way out of a shutdown after President-elect Donald J. Trump torpedoed the spending deal the speaker struck with Democrats this week, leaving Republicans without a strategy to fund the government past a Friday night deadline.
As Mr. Johnson met with his deputies on Thursday morning in his office in the Capitol, lawmakers eager to return home ahead of a scheduled winter recess were left in limbo with no clear solution to keep federal funds flowing past 12:01 a.m. on Saturday.
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.”
On Wednesday, 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.
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.
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.
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.
A 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.
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 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."
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