House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters early Friday afternoon that he does not “anticipate” a government shutdown and that lawmakers would vote on a new stopgap budget—sans a debt ceiling—in the coming hours.
“We have a unified Republican Conference,” he insisted. “We have unanimous agreement in the room that we need to move forward. I will not telegraph to you the specific details of that yet.”
Those comments came after Johnson promised Friday morning that “we’ve got a plan” to strike a deal that can gain both Republican and Democratic support in what little time remains.
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The move is a slap in the face for President-elect Donald Trump who has insisted that any deal should involve either extending or removing the debt ceiling—the amount of money the government can borrow to pay its bills—before he takes office in January to implement a program of tax slashing and border measures that will likely cost trillions of dollars.
Trump posted Friday that if the government was to shut down now it would be blamed on President Joe Biden.
“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP,’” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”
Trump’s post came with mere hours remaining for a funding deal to be found before the federal government runs out of money at midnight on Friday. The threat of a shutdown suddenly became a very real possibility earlier this week after Elon Musk and Trump pressured Republicans to block a bipartisan spending deal.
A Trump-backed plan to fund the government and suspend the debt ceiling through 2027 was rejected in an overwhelming defeat on the House floor Thursday night. No fewer than 38 Republican congressmen joined all but three Democrats in voting against the bill. Trump has nevertheless continued to up the ante in demanding he gets what he wants, even as the funding deadline ticks ever closer.
“Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling,” he posted early Friday. “Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.”
If no agreement is found by midnight to avert the shutdown, millions of government workers and members of the military will head into the holiday season without being paid. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees could be furloughed, while those tasked with essential public safety duties—like air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration workers—would largely continue to work. Travel disruptions have happened before during shutdowns, however, as was the case in late 2018 during Trump’s first term.
Some MAGA lawmakers have relished the idea of a government shutdown, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tim Burchett, and Nancy Mace. However, Johnson promised that he’d deliver on “our obligations for our farmers who need aid” and “for the disaster victims all over the country.”
He also asserted that servicemen and other essential federal workers would continue to be “paid over the holidays.”
High-profile Republicans and Democrats have traded blows for the past few days over who’s to blame for the country being brought to the brink of another shutdown.
“Extreme MAGA Republicans are marching America to a painful government shutdown that will crash the economy and hurt working-class Americans because they would rather enact massive tax cuts for their billionaire donors than fund cancer research,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN.
Musk, who Democrats have mocked as “President Musk” for his outsized influence in bringing down the original bipartisan funding deal, has in turn claimed the “responsibility for the shutdown rests squarely” on Jeffries’ shoulders—apparently overlooking his calls for a shutdown earlier in the week.
