The government lurched toward a shutdown after the House on Thursday rejected a hastily produced plan ordered up by President-elect Donald J. Trump to keep funding flowing, with dozens of Republicans defying his demand to pair the spending with a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit.
The vote sent Speaker Mike Johnson back to the drawing board ahead of a Friday night deadline with no clear path to keeping the government open. Right-wing lawmakers balked at increasing the government’s borrowing limit, something many of them have long pledged not to do without spending cuts to keep the debt from ballooning further.
They were joined by Democrats who savaged the G.O.P. for bowing to Mr. Trump and reneging on a spending compromise Mr. Johnson had reached with them only days earlier.
The vote was 174 to 235, with one member voting “present.” Thirty-eight Republicans joined almost every Democrat in voting “no.”
It was an epic meltdown that reflected the deep divisions among Republicans in Congress and a fraught dynamic between them and Mr. Trump that portends a difficult road ahead in January, when the G.O.P. will hold full control of Congress and he will be back in the White House. In particular, it suggested that the president-elect’s ambitious fiscal plans, including a large tax cut, could face a rocky path on Capitol Hill even with his own party in charge.
Even before the spending measure hit the House floor on Thursday evening, it appeared doomed to fail. It was made public roughly two hours before the vote was held, and Mr. Johnson used a special procedure to fast-track it to a vote that required the support of two-thirds of lawmakers to push it across the finish line. In the end, it did not come close to drawing even a simple majority.
Like the original bipartisan deal Mr. Johnson struck with Democrats, which Mr. Trump blew up on Wednesday in a hail of criticism, the bill would have extended government funding at current levels through mid-March, and provided $100 billion in disaster aid and $10 billion in direct payments to farmers. It also would have extended the expiring farm bill for a year. The measure omitted 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 demand that Mr. Trump abruptly issued on Wednesday — two days before the shutdown deadline — and then insisted that Republicans include in any measure to keep government spending flowing.
Mr. Trump threw his support behind the bill, 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.
But the proposal was at odds with the position that many G.O.P. lawmakers have held for years — that they would never back an increase in the government’s borrowing limit without spending cuts to slow the growth of the national debt.
“You never have any ounce of self-respect,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, said in heated remarks to his G.O.P. colleagues on the House floor. “To take this bill and congratulate yourself because it’s shorter in pages, but increases the debt by $5 trillion, is asinine.”
He added that he was “absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility” but was prepared to support legislation that would pave the way for so much more debt.
Mr. Johnson’s original plan to avert a shutdown imploded on Wednesday amid a backlash by G.O.P. lawmakers that was fueled by Elon Musk, who spent much of the day trashing the measure on social media and threatening the political future of any Republican who supported it.
Mr. Trump later joined in with his debt limit demand, saying he would rather raise it while President Biden is still in office than be responsible for doing so next year after he takes office and Republicans are in full control of Congress.
Democrats also refused to back a debt-limit increase they argued would ease the path for Mr. Trump and Republicans to ram through extensive tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of working people.
Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, tore into Republicans for rejecting the deal Mr. Johnson had negotiated with her party, arguing that G.O.P. leaders had caved to Mr. Musk.
“We must unequivocally reject the illegitimate oligarchy that seeks to usurp the authority of the United States Congress and of the American people,” Ms. DeLauro said.
Only two Democrats, Representatives Kathy Castor of Florida and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, voted “yes.”
The debt 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.”
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 do not act before the Saturday morning deadline, the entire government will 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 would be “easily” re-elected to the role next year if he did 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.”
Hours later, the bill Mr. Trump had demanded Mr. Johnson deliver failed resoundingly on the floor.
The speaker’s handling of the deal has also left a number of conservatives in the House openly mulling whether to support him in a vote on the 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.”
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