Trump scrambles stopgap bill as GOP leaders mull next moves

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.”

Trump later wrote on his own social network, Truth Social, that he’d agree to “terminating” the debt ceiling altogether — something top Democrats have pushed for in the past.

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.

Discussions in the Capitol dragged into the evening. Sources familiar with talks said various options were under consideration, including pairing a three-month stopgap funding bill with disaster assistance and farm aid, as well as some undetermined debt limit provision.

Another option: a very short-term continuing resolution, which would buy a little extra time but force members to return to Washington shortly after Christmas.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said late Wednesday that leadership continued to discuss options, including on the debt limit.

Talk of a skinnier bill with a “clean” continuing resolution running to mid-March had been circulating before Trump’s missive, which he later criticized on Truth Social as “so destructive to our country” if the debt ceiling isn’t dealt with as part of the package.

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.

But top Democrats were showing no signs of being on board with scrapping the bipartisan deal and backing a new slimmer version. Their hardball tactics put the onus on Trump and Johnson to rally enough votes for a bill to get through both chambers, when it’s not clear even all Republicans would back it.

“House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt everyday Americans all across this country,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday night. “House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited upon the American people that results from a government shutdown or worse.”

‘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.

In his separate Truth Social post, however, Trump allowed that while now may not be the right time for a member pay raise, he might consider one “in the near future.”

In his Truth Social post, Trump also took aim at a provision in the current stopgap bill that would extend the authorization for the State Department’s anti-disinformation office, the Global Engagement Center, for a year. He said the “communist” GEC was a “project of Crooked Hillary Clinton” that should not “in any way, shape or form be extended.”

No mood to help

Rep. Norma J. Torres, D-Calif., said she was in mood to vote for an alternative package.

“I don’t know where Speaker Johnson is going to get his votes, but I’m certainly not going to join him in another disaster like the one he is presenting because he simply can’t get his caucus in order,” she said.

Torres blamed Musk and his compatriots who are wealthy enough to weather the economic consequences of a shutdown.

“We absolutely are (heading for a shutdown), if we are going to govern according to people that have no sense of what a carton of eggs costs … or to have to live from paycheck to paycheck,” Torres said. “For them, it’s a game.”

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 Jeffries 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.”

_____

(Daniel Hillburn and Justin Papp contributed to this report.)

_____