The House passed a government funding package late Wednesday that will close out the longest shutdown in history.
Members returned to Washington after a 54-day recess to vote on the shutdown-ending bill brokered across party lines in the Senate. They voted 222-209, with just a handful of Democrats breaking with their leadership to get the measure over the finish line.
President Donald Trump is expected to sign the measure into law before the end of the night, setting up federal operations to resume Thursday morning.
The package includes a three-bill “minibus” of full-year funding for the Department of Agriculture and the FDA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction projects and the operations of Congress. The trio of bills is the result of months of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations between top appropriators.
Under the measure, all other agencies are funded through Jan. 30, giving some — but not much — time for another round of spending fights among appropriators who want to avoid another stopgap for the remainder of the fiscal year.
Two Republicans joined Democrats in opposition to the measure, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Greg Steube of Florida. Otherwise, Speaker Mike Johnson’s conference stuck together to back the funding package endorsed by the president.
Democrats were largely united in opposition to the package, which did not address their primary demand during the government shutdown: passage of legislation to extend enhanced tax credits under the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire at the end of the year, driving up premiums for more than 20 million Americans.
Under the terms of the agreement in the Senate, Democrats will get a vote in mid-December on a bill to extend the subsidies. The Democrats who negotiated the bipartisan arrangement lauded this concession from GOP leaders as a victory, and a chance to win over Republicans who might be convinced to pursue a compromise. But Speaker Mike Johnson was not part of these negotiations and has refused to promise a similar vote in the House.
House Democrats are furious about the concession from their Senate colleagues and believe they now have little to no leverage to force a vote on the extension many Republicans oppose as wasteful and impractical.
“There’s only two ways that this fight will end,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a floor speech before the vote. “Either Republicans finally decide to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits this year, or the American people will throw Republicans out of their jobs next year and end the speakership of Donald J. Trump once and for all.”
Still, six moderate Democrats ended up siding with Republicans to end the shutdown. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, the only Democrat to vote for the stopgap back in September, voted “yes” again. He was joined by Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Adam Gray of California, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Tom Suozzi of New York and Don Davis of North Carolina.
“I think the progress the Democrats have made by actually getting a year extension on the SNAP program in the Agriculture bill specifically is appropriate,” said Gray in explaining his support. “We need to take the poor families and working families that are in need of these programs out of the middle of a fight that was never appropriate.”
While House members were not involved in the handshake agreements that were forged in the Senate to win Democratic votes, House appropriators were involved in negotiating the minibus.
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) on Tuesday night at the House Rules Committee meeting celebrated that House earmarks survived the bicameral conference for both the military construction and agriculture divisions, “reflecting Congress’ clear control over the power of the purse” at a time when the Trump administration has repeatedly moved to make its own decisions about government spending.
The agreement negotiated in the Senate, which paved the way for enough Democrats to agree to advance the funding package, included a guarantee that the White House would rehire all federal employees who were fired early in the shutdown as part of the administration’s “reductions in force” across agencies. The White House has also pledged that all federal workers would receive back pay for the duration of the shutdown.
Agencies will be required to give written notice to Congress that it has both delivered the back pay and rehired laid-off employees.
Future blanket firings would be limited with a broad prohibition on reductions in force in any department or agency at least until the Jan. 30 end date of the continuing resolution.
Eleventh-hour controversy emerged as House lawmakers on both sides of the aisle balked at a provision originating in the Senate that would allow senators, but not House members, to sue the government for having their electronic data collected without their knowledge.
The language was tucked into the portion of the minibus that funds the operations of Congress by Senate Majority Leader John Thune and without consultation with appropriators in his chamber or leadership in the House. It could allow eight Republican senators to receive a $500,000 payout each following revelations that their phone records were subpoenaed as part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The GOP grumblings played out Tuesday night during a House Rules Committee hearing on the funding bill, with Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Morgan Griffith of Virginia and Austin Scott of Georgia describing their disapproval. Scott said the provision should be removed, while Chip called it a “self-serving, self-dealing” provision. Cole said he was “surprised” to see the provision added and questioned whether it should be included.
House Republicans didn’t tank the funding package over the provision but already have plans to hold a vote to reverse the language next week once the government is reopened, though it is unlikely the Senate would take up that standalone bill.
“I’m not voting to give Lindsey Graham half a million dollars,” Steube told reporters ahead of the vote. He was referring to the South Carolina Republican who was among those singled out in Smith’s investigation.
Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.
