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US House Republicans have crafted a new spending bill that acquiesces to Donald Trump’s demand to seek a two-year extension to the debt limit in order to avoid a government shutdown by the end of the week.
The 116-page bill put forward on Thursday would also extend government spending to March 14 and includes billions of dollars for communities devastated by natural disasters. The president-elect urged Republicans and Democrats to vote for the deal. “SUCCESS in Washington!” he posted on his Truth Social platform
Democrats, however, immediately bashed the proposal, putting into question whether the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson had enough votes to pass his new plan.
“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters, referring to Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk. “It’s laughable. Extreme Maga Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”
The House and Senate will need to move quickly to vote on the bill in order to get it to President Joe Biden for his signature before a Friday night deadline, after which the government will shut down.
The second attempt comes after Trump sent House Republicans scrambling by rejecting their initial spending bill, negotiated by Johnson, which the president-elect deemed “unacceptable”. The president-elect also made the additional demand that lawmakers include a measure to raise the government’s debt ceiling.
Musk piled pressure on Johnson and Republicans in a series of social media posts on his X platform on Wednesday, criticising the initial 1,500-page bill as “terrible” and bloated with unnecessary spending and other measures.
The legislative crisis has put Johnson’s leadership in doubt, with far-right members such as Marjorie Taylor Greene musing that Musk could replace him as Speaker.
The quip underscored Johnson’s vulnerability. Asked by NBC News on Thursday morning whether he still had confidence in the Speaker, Trump said: “We’ll see.”
The first three-month stop-gap bill had been negotiated between Johnson and Democrats, whose support he will need to pass the bill. It would have averted a government shutdown by maintaining current levels of spending until March 14, when Republicans will have control of Congress after November’s election victory.
It also contained unrelated provisions, including a pay increase for members of Congress and an easier path for the Washington Commanders American football team to move its stadium from Maryland to Washington, DC.
But the bill did not touch the debt limit, which was expected to expire in the first several months of Trump’s second term. Trump called it a “Democrat trap” and threatened Republican members that he would field primary challengers against them in the next election if they voted to support a short-term spending measure without raising the debt ceiling.
“There won’t be anything approved unless the debt ceiling is done with,” Trump told ABC News. “If we don’t get it, then we’re going to have a shutdown, but it’ll be a Biden shutdown, because shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president.”
In a sign of the targeted attacks that Trump and Musk have promised against Republicans who disobey their directives, Trump on Thursday singled out conservative House representative Chip Roy, who has consistently sought to cut spending, for criticism.
“Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy, with no talent,” posted Trump on Truth Social. “I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary. He won’t have a chance!”
Roy responded on X that he would oppose the legislation anyway, nodding to concerns among Republican fiscal hawks. “New bill: $110BB in deficit spending (unpaid for), $4 TRILLION+ debt ceiling increase with $0 in structural reforms for cuts.”
The debt ceiling is a perennial problem for lawmakers, who suspended the cap on borrowing until January 1 in a deal reached last year. To borrow beyond that limit, the Treasury department can use what it calls “extraordinary measures” to cover new expenditures without breaching the cap.
This can buy the government time before having to worry about a potential default — a disastrous outcome for the world’s largest economy and most important financial system.