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The US Congress is racing to pass a short-term spending bill by the end of Friday after Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JD Vance convinced Republicans to ditch bipartisan legislation to avert a government shutdown.
Trump on Thursday reiterated demands that lawmakers raise the government’s debt ceiling rather than pass the “unacceptable” legislation.
His eleventh-hour intervention, which came after Musk, his billionaire adviser, criticised the bill in a series of social media posts on Wednesday, increases the likelihood that thousands of federal workers could see their pay suspended.
The collapse of the bill also puts the leadership of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in doubt, with far-right members such as Marjorie Taylor Greene musing that Musk could replace him as speaker.
The quip underscores Johnson’s vulnerability. Asked by NBC News whether he still had confidence in the speaker, Trump on Thursday said: “We’ll see.”
Referring to the spending bill, a three-month stop gap that Johnson had agreed with Democrats in the House of Representatives, Trump said: “What they had yesterday was unacceptable. In many ways it was unacceptable. It’s a Democrat trap.”
The legislation 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 easing the path for the Washington Commanders American football team to move its stadium from Maryland to Washington, DC.
Although Congress could pass a short-term bill to maintain current levels of government funding Trump has threatened Republican members that he would field primary challengers against them in the next election if they voted to support the 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 [Joe] Biden shutdown, because shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president.”
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.
Trump and vice-president-elect Vance killed the 1,500 page bill after claiming, among other things, that it would “make it easier to hide the records of the corrupt January 6 committee”, which investigated the former president’s role in inciting the attack on the Capitol in 2021.
Musk argued it would be better to have a government shutdown than to pass Johnson’s legislation.
When it collapsed, the billionaire posted on X: “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead.”
“The voice of the people has triumphed!”