A federal government shutdown was looming Friday as congressional Republicans sought to come up with a new stopgap spending plan after a proposal backed by President-elect Trump failed badly.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that GOP leaders were crafting a so-called Plan C after 38 Republicans voted against a Trump-endorsed proposal late Thursday.
“Stay tuned. We’ve got a plan,” Johnson told reporters as he hustled into his Capitol Hill office.
Trump sought to blame President Biden even though it was he and Elon Musk who sunk Johnson’s original agreement with Democrats, which had been expected to pass fairly easily.
“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under Trump,” Trump wrote on his social media site, referring to the date when he returns to the White House.
There have been no substantive negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, suggesting there is little chance of the latest proposal passing the House, let alone being enacted into law as required before the midnight deadline when parts of the government will start to shut down.
Democratic support is needed because many GOP House lawmakers refuse to go along with their party’s own proposals and Democrats still control the Senate and White House.
Congress has until midnight Friday to fund the government or federal agencies will shut down, meaning hundreds of thousands of federal employees could be sent home — or stay on the job without pay — just ahead of the holidays.
Republicans abandoned a bipartisan plan Wednesday to prevent a shutdown after Trump and Musk told House Speaker Mike Johnson to essentially rip up the deal days before a deadline when federal funding runs out.
The president-elect also unexpectedly demanded that Congress repeal or suspend the debt ceiling, a controversial and divisive proposal that most conservative GOP lawmakers strongly oppose.
On Thursday, Republicans cobbled together a revamped government funding proposal that would keep the government running for three more months and suspend the debt ceiling for two years, until Jan. 30, 2027.
It included more than $100 billion for hurricane relief and billions more for farmers, both key GOP priorities, but stripped out provisions that Johnson had previously agreed to in a handshake deal with Democrats.
The bill failed badly in a House vote hours later, with more than three dozen Republicans almost all Democrats opposing it, leaving next steps uncertain.
If no bill is passed, any government operations deemed nonessential will cease and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will see their work disrupted.
