President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday condemned a stopgap spending bill Republicans and Democrats agreed on this week to avert a shutdown, putting the deal on life support days before a Saturday morning deadline to fund the government.
Mr. Trump’s scathing statement came after the deal had already faced a barrage of criticism on Wednesday by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaires who are leading an outside group to slash government spending during the coming Trump administration.
It was not yet clear how Speaker Mike Johnson planned to proceed as the package appeared to be hemorrhaging support. But the blowback underscored the extraordinarily fraught position top Republican leaders will have to manage next year when they control Congress and face a president with a penchant for blowing up politically fraught compromises, and a circle of influential outside players willing to threaten Republicans if they fail to accede to his wishes.
A swell of Republican lawmakers — both ultraconservatives and some mainstream members — were already 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 early next year, but it emerged from bipartisan negotiations laden with $100 billion in disaster aid and dozens of other, unrelated policies.
The final nail in the coffin appeared to come when Mr. Trump weighed in on Wednesday, 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 by Congress to borrow to meet its financial obligations.
“We should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t given 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 crusade against the bill, posting nearly nonstop on his social media platform X on Wednesday about how lawmakers needed to kill it. 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.
Even before Mr. Trump got involved, typically reliable Republican votes for stopgap funding measures in the Senate had begun to balk. Senator John Cornyn of Texas called the bill a “monstrosity.”
“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.”
Mr. Trump’s insistence on Wednesday that Republicans redo the funding bill and add an increase in the federal debt ceiling while President Biden is still in the White House reflected a recognition that his party would have a difficult time raising the nation’s borrowing limit themselves next year when they have full control of Congress. 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.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great,” Mr. Trump said in the statement, “but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”
Democrats, for their part, appeared in no mood to start any new negotiations.
“House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said. “You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow.”
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