The House on Wednesday gave final passage to a spending package to reopen the government, sending the legislation to President Trump’s desk and all but guaranteeing an end to the longest shutdown in the nation’s history.
The 222-to-209 vote came on Day 43 of the shutdown and days after eight senators in the Democratic caucus broke their own party’s blockade and joined Republicans in allowing the spending measure to move forward, prompting a bitter backlash in their ranks. It was the first time the House had held a vote in nearly two months, as it took an extended recess during the shutdown.
Six Democrats joined Republicans in approving the bill. Only two Republicans voted against it, Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Greg Steube of Florida.
Mr. Trump has said he will sign the bill into law. His budget office championed it in a statement on Wednesday as devoid of “any of the partisan, ‘poison pill’ provisions demanded by the Democrats.”
That was a reference to what had been Democrats’ chief demand in the shutdown fight, the extension of federal health care subsidies set to expire at the end of the year. Most congressional Republicans strongly oppose such an extension. And while Mr. Trump had initially shown a flash of interest in brokering a bipartisan deal on the issue, as the shutdown dragged on he made it clear that he had no interest in negotiating.
His refusal to do so ultimately led a critical group of Democrats in the Senate to conclude that with hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, millions of Americans at risk of losing food assistance and millions more facing air-travel disruptions, it was time to find an off-ramp from the shutdown.
“History reminds us that shutdowns never change the outcome, only the cost paid by the American people,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said. “Over the last 43 days, the facts did not shift, the votes required did not shift and the path forward did not change.”
The Democratic defections in the Senate prompted outrage among House Democrats who, like most of their colleagues in the Senate, said their party should have held together firmly against any government funding bill that failed to address health care costs.
“We have federal workers across the country that have been missing paychecks,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said. “We have SNAP recipients, millions of SNAP recipients across the country whose access to food stability was imperiled, and we have to figure out what that was for.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said that the Trump administration had inflicted “cruelty” on the American people during the shutdown, including by trying to halt full federal funding for food stamps.
“We cannot enable this kind of cruelty with our cowardice,” she said.
Having elevated the health care subsidies as a political issue, Democrats are eager to keep the pressure on Republicans to extend them or face the consequences from voters who polls show overwhelmingly want to see them protected.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said he and other party leaders would file a discharge petition — a procedural maneuver to steer around the leadership and force a bill to the floor — to extend the subsidies for three years. Such a measure is unlikely to pick up much Republican support.
“There are only two ways this fight will end,” Mr. Jeffries said on the House floor. “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.”
The compromise measure the House approved on Wednesday includes a spending package that would fund the government through January, as well as three separate spending bills to cover programs related to agriculture, military construction, veterans and legislative agencies for most of 2026.
The package includes a provision that would reverse layoffs of federal workers made during the shutdown and ensure retroactive pay for those who have been furloughed.
And it includes a measure that would provide a wide legal avenue for Republican senators whose phone records were seized as part of the investigation by Jack Smith, the former special counsel, into the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to sue the government for at least half a million dollars each.
That provision was quietly slipped into the spending deal by Senate leaders, and provoked wide, bipartisan ire among House lawmakers who have said they are looking for future avenues to strike it down. If they had sought to take it out of the spending deal, it would have prolonged the shutdown, because any changes the House made would have sent the measure back to the Senate for final approval.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a conservative Republican who was one of the Biden Department of Justice’s harshest critics, said it was “beside my comprehension that this got put in the bill, and it is why people have such a low opinion of this town.”
Mr. Johnson said on Wednesday ahead of the vote that House Republicans would introduce legislation to repeal that provision, and would fast-track the measure for a vote as early as next week.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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