Congress Averts Government Shutdown After Trump and Musk’s Effort to Sink Deal

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill 366-34 on Friday night to continuing funding the government, averting the shutdown that loomed after Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump sank a bipartisan spending agreement earlier in the week.

The Senate then approved the continuing resolution 85-11 early Saturday, which will keep the government funded at current levels through March 14. It also included the disaster relief and aid to farmers that were central pieces of the original bipartisan legislation and excluded Trump’s last-minute demand to raise the debt ceiling.

However, it was significantly smaller than the original bill — slashed from 1,500 to 118 pages — and the cuts included healthcare expansion for older Americans, a plan to lower prescription drug prices, and an apprenticeship program for young people.

“Tonight, in a victory for the American people and a loss for Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the House passed legislation to keep the government open, provide $100 billion in critical disaster relief to communities across America, and fund $10 billion in aid for struggling farmers and ranchers,” outgoing Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash) said in a statement.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also celebrated the averted shutdown.

“We stopped extreme MAGA Republicans from shutting down the government and crashing the economy,” he wrote on Bluesky. “The American people have won this round. Far-right billionaires have lost. The struggle continues in the new year.”

The bill’s passage capped a whirlwind few days in the U.S. House after Musk — the richest man in the world whom Trump has appointed to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency — spent all of Wednesday tweeting against the original spending package released by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday. After Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance joined Musk’s crusade against the bill, Johnson refrained from bringing it to the floor.

Instead, he attempted to pass another bill on Thursday that would have raised the debt limit through 2027, in accordance with Trump’s request. That bill was voted down 174-235, with only two Democrats voting in favor and 38 Republicans rejecting it. Johnson then briefly considered passing individual bills Friday morning before introducing the proposal that finally passed with the support of 170 Republicans and every Democrat except Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), who voted present.

“We forced President-elect Trump and Shadow President Elon Musk to back down from the 11th-hour demand to pass a suspension of the debt ceiling, a move that would have paved the way for a Trump Tax Scam 2.0 that would once again send trillions of dollars to the billionaires and giant corporations while cutting Social Security and Medicare for working people and poor people to pay for those tax cuts to the wealthiest,” Jayapal said. “Democrats forced Republicans to back down and, when we enter a Republican trifecta, it will be on Republicans to deliver all the votes for such a scam. Democrats won’t bail them out—on that or any of their policies that cater to the wealthiest in America at the expense of working people and struggling Americans.”

The passage of the disaster aid was celebrated by more than 50 storm and fire survivors who had sent a delegation to Congress last week to share their stories and demand that Congress fully fund recovery efforts, as federal dollars for relief have been delayed by over two years.

“We commend Republicans and Democrats for prioritizing disaster aid—this is how it should be,” said Amanda Devecka-Rinear, co-founder of an organization of Superstorm Sandy survivors. “But the maneuvering we just witnessed, including an unelected billionaire holding disaster aid hostage via the social media platform that he owns, once again underscores how precarious the reality is for disaster survivors in America. And we will continue to stand together to get our communities home and whole.”

While Devecka-Rinear said the funding “represents a significant step forward,” she added that it was “not the finish line.”

“Stopgap measures like this cannot continue to be the norm,” she said. “We need a disaster recovery system that families can successfully navigate. Survivors deserve reliable, sustainable, and permanent funding.”

Zoe Middleton, the associate director for just climate resilience for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, also called for a permanent disaster-relief solution.

“Communities need and deserve robustly funded recovery programs to get back on their feet in the weeks and months following a disaster,” Middleton said in a statement. “Allowing funding for short-term relief to run dry and making communities wait on long-term recovery assistance can push families into debt or leave them homeless and can also cause lasting economic scars on local economies.”

She continued: “People across the country are losing their homes and livelihoods to the climate crisis while fossil fuel companies continue to rake in profits. In addition to passing this short-term, stopgap funding, Congress should invest in measures that prepare climate-vulnerable communities for disasters before they strike and permanently authorize Community Development Block Grants to ensure people aren’t forced into desperate straits after they’ve experienced the worst.”

The bill’s passage also sets the stage for the coming year, in which Republicans will control the presidency, House, and Senate — foreshadowing future fights and revealing the extent of Musk’s influence over the future president and Republican lawmakers.

During closed-door negotiations, Republican House members on Friday shared a slide showing a draft agreement to swap $2.5 trillion in spending cuts for a $1.5 trillion debt-ceiling increase next year. Cuts could target essential programs including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal nutrition assistance.

“Republicans are already taking cues from Elon Musk and his DOGE commission and clearing the deck to ram through giant tax giveaways for the ultra-wealthy,” Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens said in a statement. “Their plans for the new year are crystal clear: Cut trillions from Social Security, Medicare, and other critical programs to pay for their own massive tax cuts.”

Jayapal said that Democrats would need “spines of steel to oppose all of the ways in which Republicans inflict cruelty on America’s working people and poor people who are still struggling to get by and deserve so much more.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who voted against the continuing resolution, lamented key provisions that had been cut from the spending bill after Musk and Trump’s opposition. These included measures to expand primary healthcare, mental healthcare, substance abuse counseling, and nutrition programs for older Americans; boost vocational training for 100,000 young people; and attempt to regulate Pharmacy Benefit Managers, who inflate prescription drug costs.

“These important proposals, negotiated by Democrats and Republicans for months and agreed to by both sides of the aisle, were stripped from this bill by an unelected billionaire named Elon Musk,” Sanders said. “Musk, the richest person on Earth, threatened to use his fortune to unseat any member of Congress who would have voted for the original bipartisan legislation.”

Sanders concluded: “The precedent that has been set today in Congress should upset every American who believes in our democratic form of government. It appears that from now on no major legislation can be passed without the approval of the wealthiest person in this country. That’s not democracy, that’s oligarchy.”