The Senate voted 85 to 11 to pass the stopgap spending bill shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, warding off a government shutdown before the holidays. President Joe Biden signed the bill, which already received House approval on Friday afternoon.
The 11th-hour deal came after President-elect Donald Trump, with the help of ally and billionaire Elon Musk, tanked bipartisan congressional budget negotiations earlier this week. Following critiques from the pair, Republicans tossed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s bill, forcing him to rework the legislation in just a couple of short days. The spending bill will fund the government through March 14, potentially opening up another contentious approval process in the first months of Trump’s second term.
Friday evening, Musk took to his social media site, X, formerly Twitter, to celebrate the House’s decision to pass the revised bill.
In a post commenting on how many pages the old bill was versus the new, Trump and Musk backed one, he spoke directly to his followers, saying, “Your actions turned a bill that weighed pounds into a bill that weighed ounces! You are the media now.”
“VOX POPULI,” he continued, “VOX DEI”—Latin for the voice of the people is the voice of God.
While Trump’s pushback this week led to a deeply different final bill, he didn’t get everything on his wishlist. Despite his demands to Republicans to suspend the debt limit, dozens refused, in a “rare breach by a group of Republicans who have traditionally backed Mr. Trump’s policy preferences unquestioningly and taken pains to avoid defying him,” the New York Times’ Catie Edmondson and Andrew Duehren report.
The final bill includes more than $110 billion in disaster aid funding, $10 billion in economic aid for farmers and a one-year extension of the farm bill, monies dedicated to replacing the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland, which collapsed after a cargo ship crashed into it in March, and an extension of a Covid-19-related measure that expanded the use of telehealth in Medicare—amongst other things.
