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.
Still, several funding measures were lost once when that taller stack of paper was reduced to “ounces” this week.
The bipartisan bill set to pass earlier this week would have reauthorized federal funding for the National Institutes of Health’s Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program, securing funding for the next seven years. The one that passed didn’t.
In response, the Senate passed a separate bill Friday night authorizing $12.5 million per year until 2028, continuing an Obama-era law focused on lifesaving research on treatments and cures for childhood cancer.
Other funding items that got the chop were “continued protections for low-income Americans who had their food stamp benefits stolen, often through skimming devices that get recipients’ Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card information,” per CNN; reforms that would have required pharmacy benefit managers to provide additional information on the drug rebates they negotiate and retain; increased salaries for lawmakers that were slated to include automatic cost-of-living adjustments; and a provision to limit US investments in China, particularly in the technology sector—a move that could have been detrimental to Musk.
Also left out of the final stopgap spending bill was a bipartisan effort that “would have forced social media companies to remove so-called revenge porn and intimate imagery posted without consent,” according to Politico. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and cosponsored by 20 other senators from both parties, uniquely took aim at nonconsensual intimate imagery generated by artificial intelligence. According to a report released earlier this month by The American Sunlight Project, more than two dozen lawmakers, an overwhelming majority of them women, have been the victims of this kind of deepfake pornography.
While X has been reportedly pushing for the act’s passage, the Times’ Kate Conger writes that “Musk jeopardized its passage” by strongly opposing Johnson’s original bill, actions that “eventually led to its defeat in a House vote on Thursday night.”
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The post US Government Shutdown Barely Averted, After Trump and Musk Halted Bipartisan Negotiations appeared first on Vanity Fair.
