House passes Trump-backed stopgap to keep government funded

Nearly halfway into the fiscal year, House Republicans gave up Tuesday and passed an extension of spending largely at 2024 levels, saying they wanted to turn the page and start on President Trump’s agenda.

They made some changes, cutting from a few programs and boosting money for GOP priorities such as immigration enforcement and the military.

The measure, known as a continuing resolution or “CR” in Washington-speak, passed on a 217-213 vote, with one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, joining all but one Republican in support.

House Speaker Mike Johnson called it the best of a bad set of options this late in the fiscal year and given political divisions within his party and Democrats’ eagerness to hang a loss on Mr. Trump. 

“I did what we had to do, what was necessary, what we could get 218 votes for,” Mr. Johnson said. “This is a totally different scenario. By doing the CR this time, it actually is the responsible play and the conservative play, because we are conserving the resources of the American people.”

The bill marked a retreat for the Louisiana Republican, who had promised not to accept a continuing resolution.

Mr. Trump’s backing of the measure proved the deciding factor in convincing fiscal hawks weary of supporting stopgaps.

Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, cast the sole no vote in the GOP. His plan to vote against the stopgap earned him a threat from Mr. Trump, who vowed to “lead the charge” to find a candidate to replace him in the 2026 election.

Mr. Massie shrugged it off. He noted that when he was the only Republican to vote against Mr. Trump’s COVID-19 relief bill in 2020, he received the same threat but still won reelection with 81% of the vote.

“The missives directed at me weren’t to try to get me to change my vote. I never change my vote,” Mr. Massie said. “I think they were to try to keep the other Republicans in line until they get this over to the Senate, where you’re going to find out what a stinker it is when you get like 10 or 15 Democrats over there to vote for something that the Freedom Caucus endorsed over here.”

In the Republican-run Senate, the bill will need Democratic votes to clear the 60-vote threshold to survive. But the pressure will be on Democrats to stop a partial government shutdown.

Congress’ deadline to fund the government is Friday, when funding expires from a stopgap measure passed in December. The bill funds the government through the end of September. 

Republicans said the bill cut $13 billion from non-defense spending while boosting defense spending by roughly $6 billion over last year’s levels. It also gives the Pentagon wiggle room over an additional $8 billion in funds that can be moved and shifted toward priority programs and contracts. 

The CR also boosts veterans’ healthcare by $6 billion to avoid a costly shortfall that VA officials warned of last year and continues the pay increase for service members passed in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act. 

There’s also more than $9 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a slight bump from the previous year’s spending, and more than a $500 million increase for the government’s nutritional program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC.

Republicans said the bill did not adopt any controversial new policy provisions. 

Rep. Ryan Zinke, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he would prefer to pass spending bills rather than turning to a stopgap, but still appreciated the increases in defense spending it provided. 

“This is as good as we’re going to get,” said Mr. Zinke, Montana Republican. “And the alternative, quite frankly, is shutting down the government.” 

Despite the money for the VA and WIC, Democrats panned the measure as a “blank check” for the Trump administration that would hurt veterans and low-income Americans and kneecapped Army Corps of Engineers projects. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, warned that the GOP’s stopgap bill “does nothing” to protect Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. While the latter two entitlement programs fall under the mandatory spending category, which Congress does not control, Republicans have proposed cost-saving changes to Medicaid in their budget plan. 

“You want to take a chainsaw to these priorities,” Mr. Jeffries said. 

Republican leadership and Mr. Trump have said that none of those programs would be touched, but the president’s efficiency czar Elon Musk said Monday night that entitlement programs constitute the bulk of federal spending and that they would be “the big one to eliminate.”

The chairs of the House and Senate appropriations committees would have preferred passing regular spending bills. Instead, the focus shifted to fiscal 2026, which begins Oct. 1. Those bills will hinge on the budget from Mr. Trump that is expected in April.

“We really can’t start without it,” said House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, Oklahoma Republican. “We don’t have a top line yet. We don’t have a presidential budget.”