WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump lobbed a grenade into Speaker Mike Johnson’s carefully negotiated, catchall legislative package late Wednesday, urging Republicans to scrap the massive stopgap funding measure in favor of a stripped-down version with aid to farmers and natural disaster victims.

There’s another new wrinkle: Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance said they want a debt ceiling boost added to the bill, rather than have to deal with it on their watch in mid-2025 when the Treasury Department is expected to again run out of borrowing authority.

“Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, and set our country up for success in 2025. The only way to do that is with a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling,” Trump and Vance wrote on the social platform X. “Anything else is a betrayal of our country.”

Lawmakers spent the day waiting for Trump to weigh in, after his unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency” co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy weighed in against it. Even before Trump’s statement, Musk wrote that the “terrible bill is dead” on X, which he owns.

There was no official word yet from Johnson, R-La., who was huddling with other top Republicans in his office on next steps. GOP leaders sent word out during the meeting that no further votes would be held Wednesday night.

Talk of a skinnier bill with a “clean” continuing resolution running to mid-March had been circulating before Trump’s missive. Plenty of GOP conservatives appear ready to back a disaster aid package, including Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Freedom Caucus member who was in the meeting in Johnson’s office Wednesday afternoon.

Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., said he thought Trump would have preferred to get all the fiscal 2025 spending bills done this year as well, but would settle for at least the debt limit and a shutdown being taken off the table.

“If you have a CR with the debt limit, at least you are getting part of the problem done,” Hern said.

‘Deserves to be voted out’

Anger over the massive, 1,547-page year-end spending bill among the GOP rank and file, fueled by Trump’s top advisers, had already thrown the carefully negotiated package into question with just two days before the deadline to prevent a partial government shutdown.

House Republican leaders had been mulling a vote as early as Wednesday afternoon on the legislative package. But that became unrealistic after leadership checked in with members during an early afternoon vote series in the face of grumbling from across the GOP conference and from Trump’s allies.

“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote earlier on X.

The bill that Johnson negotiated with Democratic leaders contains about $117 billion in emergency spending that is not offset, mostly for victims of natural disasters as well as $10 billion in financial aid for farmers and nearly $6 billion to buy more nuclear-powered Virginia-class attack submarines.

Members of Congress would get their first pay raise in 15 years, and Democratic and Republican leaders also agreed to tack on over 1,000 more pages of unrelated legislation representing the pent-up demands of numerous authorizing committees over the past two years.

Trump and Vance took particular umbrage at two provisions: the member pay raise and language that could block the Justice Department from subpoenaing House data stored by third-party providers like Google and Microsoft.

“Congress is considering a spending bill that would give sweetheart provisions for government censors and for Liz Cheney. The bill would make it easier to hide the records of the corrupt January 6 committee —which accomplished nothing for the American people and hid security failures that happened that day,” Trump and Vance wrote.

“This bill would also give Congress a pay increase while many Americans are struggling this Christmas,” they added.

Most Democrats would have backed the measure, House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said, likely giving it the two-thirds vote it needed to pass the chamber under suspension of the rules. But that was the problem for many Republicans who saw the package as too tilted toward the other side’s priorities, even if many of the legislative add-ons had bipartisan support.

The situation was getting dicey for Johnson himself, who did a lot of the heavy lifting together with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y.

A number of House Republicans were starting to make threats against Johnson’s job as the day wore on; he needs to secure a majority vote to remain speaker on Jan. 3, and any GOP defections make that difficult if not impossible.

“As of now, I still support the speaker,” said Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, chairman of the rebellious Freedom Caucus. “But I’m hearing more and more from members, inside and outside the Freedom Caucus, very concerned about the way this week has played out.” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said Johnson was “a good human being,” but added, “I think that he can do better. I think he can fight harder.”

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(Daniel Hillburn contributed to this report.)

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