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US House Speaker Mike Johnson said Congress will try a third time to pass a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown by Friday’s midnight deadline.
The Republican House leader declined to give specifics about the measure, but said his party was in “unanimous agreement” to pay government employees, including the military, and provide aid to farmers and victims of natural disasters.
“Our government is not going to shut down,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill.
Donald Trump has already tried to pin the blame on President Joe Biden and the Democrats shutdown occurs, which temporarily shuts down parts of it Govt And pay freezes for workers.
“If the government is going to shut down, let it start now, under a Biden administration, not after January 20th under ‘TRUMP,'” the president-elect wrote on his Truth social platform. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if the Republicans can help solve it, they will!”
TrumpIts looming presence, however, has been the biggest complication in the frantic last-minute deal negotiations. Republicans and their allies, including billionaire adviser Elon Musk, torpedoed an initial bipartisan compromise between Republican and Democratic leaders earlier this week.
The resulting unrest has significantly raised the risk of a shutdown before Christmas and created a growing political crisis for Johnson, a Trump ally, as he struggles with how to unite his party and meet the incoming president’s demands.
The original legislation would have kept the government open until March 14 and spent billions of dollars to help farmers and communities devastated by natural disasters. The more than 1,500-page bill includes restrictions on technology investment in China, pay raises for members of Congress and cancer research for children, among other provisions.
Musk railed against the bill on his social media platform, X, saying it was fraught with excessive spending. Johnson decided not to put the bill up for a vote after Trump and Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance came out against it.
Trump and Vance then agreed with lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling, which limits how much the U.S. can borrow to meet its obligations.
Johnson obliged, reducing the bill to 100 pages and including a section that would extend the debt ceiling by two years. This version won Trump support and he promised political consequences for any Republicans who opposed it.
The House then voted sharply against that bill late Thursday night, sending Republicans who control the chamber back to the drawing board.
Democrats, angry that the bipartisan deal was scrapped this week, blamed Musk for inserting himself into the process.
“At the behest of the richest man in the world who no one voted for, the US Congress has been thrown into a pandemic,” Democrat Rosa DeLauro said of Musk on Thursday.
Trump on Friday redoubled his pressure to get lawmakers to agree to suspend the debt ceiling.
“Congress must get rid of or extend the ridiculous 2029 debt ceiling,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Without it, we should never have made a deal.”
If a new bill passes the House on Friday, it would go to the Democrat-controlled Senate for approval and then to Biden for his signature.
“I don’t care to count how many times I’ve been reminded. . . Our House opponents won’t take the blame for how damaging it is to shut down the government and how foolish it is to bet on yourself,” Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate Republican leader, said Friday. “That said, if I hadn’t taken my advice personally every time, I probably wouldn’t have spent as long as I did on this particular job.”
