Still no vote scheduled on spending bill after Trump, Musk, others trash latest stopgap; shutdown at midnight

A partial government shutdown loomed after President-elect Donald Trump this week told congressional Republicans to oppose a three-month continuing resolution.

With about 12 hours to go until a shutdown at deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor, lawmakers were still scrambling to find a bill that could pass the House.

A backstop continuing resolution favored by Trump did not get the votes it needed to pass on the House floor Thursday after all but two Democrats opposed it, along with some hard-line Republicans opposed to extending U.S. borrowing limits.

At deadline, Speaker of the House Rep. Michael Johnson (R-La.) had not proposed another alternative to the three-month spending package Republicans published Tuesday, and which would if passed keep the government open through March 14.

The bill that Trump, who will be sworn in Jan. 20, urged Republicans to oppose would have kept the Department of Energy’s defense-nuclear programs funded at roughly their 2024 levels and added some funds to repair damage caused by summer hurricanes.

Overall under the doomed compromise bill unveiled Tuesday, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, responsible for cleanup of shuttered nuclear weapons production sites, would have gotten a little more than requested: $8.5 billion or so.

Trump called for a different bill after his ally Elon Musk, the billionaire industrialist, prolific social media poster and co-head of a non-governmental organization tasked by Trump with reducing federal spending, published many posts on his website, X, railing against the bill.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the other Trump-allied billionaire participating in the cost-cutting consultancy with Musk, joined in.