U.S. lawmakers were racing Friday to prevent a government shutdown due to bite within hours, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk sabotaged a bipartisan agreement that would have kept the lights on well beyond Christmas.
With government funding running out at midnight, the Republican-led House of Representatives needs to come up with a short-term fix to replace a funding package that looked like a done deal before the president-elect's intervention.
If no agreement is struck in the coming hours, federal agencies, national parks and an assortment of other services will begin shuttering Saturday as the government prepares to send up to 875,000 workers home for the holidays without pay.
The race against the clock comes after a week of high drama on Capitol Hill that began with Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson releasing a mammoth funding bill stuffed with unrelated measures that ballooned its cost.
Conservatives immediately voiced frustration over the add-ons in the 1,547-page text and Musk -- Trump's incoming point man on government spending cuts -- spent Wednesday bashing the deal.
Trump dealt the fatal blow with a statement demanding the deal be renegotiated to strip away much of the extraneous spending and to attach text suspending the country's self-imposed borrowing cap for two years.
The new demand -- aimed at freeing up Trump from debt negotiations -- caught Republicans off-guard and they spent Thursday scrambling to write a new, pared-back package that could keep fiscal conservatives, Trump, Musk and Democrats happy.
It proved an impossible task, with Democrats feeling betrayed over the collapse of the bipartisan agreement and unwilling to pitch in votes as dozens of debt hawks in the Republican ranks rebelled against their own leadership to sink the latest package.
- 'Phony' -
"For decades, the Republican Party has lectured America about fiscal responsibility, about the debt and the deficit. It's always been phony," Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on the House floor.
Vice president-elect JD Vance blamed Democrats, arguing that they had "voted to shut down the government" in a bid to thwart Trump's agenda -- even though the Republicans are in the majority.
The failed vote marked the first major defeat for Trump a month before he enters office, as he and Musk had both thrown their weight behind the revised plan.
Trump has made clear a shutdown should go ahead if his preferred version of the legislation cannot get through Congress, and that now looks almost certain to occur.
The White House's Office of Management and Budget has already begun contacting agencies about a potential shutdown, and Republicans have offered no clear path for getting a new bill through the House.
Funding the government is always fraught and lawmakers are under pressure this time around because they failed to agree on full-year budgets for 2025, despite months of negotiations.
Speaker Johnson has been facing criticism from all sides for his handling of the negotiations and his gavel looks likely to be under threat when he stands for reelection in January.
The Louisiana congressman was blamed for misjudging his own members' tolerance for the original funding patch's spiraling costs, and for allowing himself to have been blindsided by Musk and Trump.
Democrats, who control the Senate, have little political incentive to help Republicans and Jeffries has insisted they will only vote for the bipartisan package, meaning Trump's party will have to go it alone on any further efforts on Friday.
This is something the fractious, divided Republicans -- who can afford to lose only a handful of members in any House vote -- have not managed in any major bill in this Congress.
