- Congress avoided a government shutdown after passing a spending bill that was revised from an original version, which Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump sank.
After a wild week of last-minute revisions and negotiations, Congress passed a shorter spending bill in the middle of the night early Saturday, averting a government shutdown.
The result was legislation that ran just over 100 pages. In addition to funding the government at current levels until mid-March, it provides $110 billion in aid for natural disaster survivors and farmers, while granting an extension to the farm bill.
By contrast, the original version of the spending bill that was negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson and congressional Democrats was more than 1,500 pages.
The change came after Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump blew up what had looked like a done deal, raising the odds of a government shutdown.
On Wednesday, Musk ripped the bipartisan spending package, calling it one of the worst bills ever written and demanding that it be killed. Trump joined in and threatened any Republican who voted for it, forcing Johnson to scrap the bill that he was defending earlier.
On Thursday, a shorter version backed by Trump failed to pass the House as a bloc of conservative Republicans rejected his demand to increase the debt limit, which wasn’t in the earlier bill.
The bill that cleared Congress early Saturday ditched the debt-ceiling boost while also cutting other provisions. But Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute think tank, told the Washington Post that despite slashing the page count, the new funding deal won’t translate to much savings for taxpayers.
That’s due in part to the fact that some of the language that was taken out wasn’t directly related to the budget, as must-pass bills often get unrelated “riders” attached to them. Here’s what else came out of the spending package.
The original bill sought to reform pharmacy benefit managers, who are the middlemen between drug manufacturers and insurers, by requiring more transparency on prices while tightening pricing requirements in Medicaid and Medicare plans. PBMs have come under more scrutiny lately, and even Trump called them “rich as hell.”
Lawmakers also denied themselves a pay hike as the initial spending package called for a 3.8% cost-of-living adjustment to their base salary of $174,000 a year. It would have been their first raise since 2009.
Other provisions that were dropped include a crackdown on “junk fees” charged by ticket sellers and hotels, criminalization of deepfake “revenge porn,” further restrictions on U.S. investments in China, funding for pediatric cancer research, and reimbursements for recipients of foods stamps who had their benefits stolen.
While the spending bill also removed language to give the municipal government of Washington, D.C., greater control over RFK stadium, the Senate approved that in a separate vote via a stand-alone bill.
