Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday produced a new plan to avert a shutdown after President-elect Donald J. Trump torpedoed a spending deal he had struck with Democrats, moving to tie an extension of government funding to a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit as Mr. Trump demanded.
It was unclear whether the measure could win a majority in the House, where ultraconservative lawmakers quickly balked at increasing the government’s borrowing limit and Democrats were still livid at the demise of their original compromise plan. The proposal was the latest bid by the embattled Mr. Johnson to find a way to keep federal funding flowing past a Friday night deadline.
Like the original bipartisan deal, the bill would extend government funding at current levels through mid-March, and provide $100 billion in disaster aid, according to a person familiar with it who described it in advance of its release. It would also extend the expiring farm bill for a year, but it omits 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 measure that Mr. Trump had insisted Republicans include in any spending measure — and a step that many G.O.P. lawmakers have traditionally been loath to support.
As details of the 116-page plan trickled out on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump threw his support behind it, 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.
At least one right-wing House Republican, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, quickly came out in opposition, saying he would not vote to increase the debt limit without also winning spending cuts.
“It’s a water-downed version of the same crappy bill people were mad about yesterday,” Mr. Roy said on the Sean Hannity Show.
The deal was announced after Mr. Johnson spent the day huddling in his office at the Capitol with lawmakers, searching for an alternative to a slew of untenable options.
Mr. Trump effectively killed the huge bipartisan deal, loaded with unrelated policy changes, that the speaker negotiated to fund the government through mid-March. That plan would have drawn substantial votes from Democrats, but a Republican revolt over it fueled by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk sapped it of even the modest G.O.P. support it would have needed to pass the House.
But he was stuck with a demand from the president-elect that Republicans pair a stripped-down government funding bill with a measure raising the debt ceiling or getting rid of it altogether. That idea is largely unpopular with a number of Republicans, like Mr. Roy, though it remained unclear whether other conservatives would swallow their objections in the face of Mr. Trump’s call to action.
House Democrats were meeting Thursday afternoon to decide how to proceed. But earlier on Thursday, they were openly furious that Republicans had jettisoned their agreement.
“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious. It’s laughable,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters on his way into the closed-door meeting. “Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”
Mr. Johnson’s plan to avert a shutdown imploded on Wednesday amid a backlash by G.O.P. lawmakers that was driven in part by Mr. Musk, who spent much of the day trashing the measure on social media and threatening the political future of any Republican who supported it.
Then Mr. Trump weighed in, insisting that Republicans not only reject Mr. Johnson’s plan, which connected the government funding measure with $100 billion in disaster aid and an array of policy changes, but also raise or terminate the debt limit.
The borrowing 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 his statement, “but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”
That demand has greatly complicated the path forward. Many Republicans strongly oppose raising the debt limit. Some have refused to do so at all, and others have agreed to raise it only after extracting steep spending cuts.
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 did not act before the Saturday morning deadline, the entire government would 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 will be “easily” re-elected to the role next year if he does 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,” adding that the spending deal he negotiated was “unacceptable.”
At the same time, the speaker’s handling of the deal has left a number of conservatives openly mulling whether to support him in a vote on the House 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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