Congress approved a deal Wednesday that will end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, sending President Donald Trump a stopgap funding bill that will restart key services and pay hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
The House passed the package 222-209 after days of bitter partisan fighting, following earlier approval in the Senate, according to Reuters. The White House said Trump will sign the measure later in the day, allowing food assistance, air-traffic control operations and other shuttered programs to resume.
The bill merely gives the government money until January 30, and it doesn’t settle the main issue of federal health insurance subsidies. Democrats had hoped the record-length shutdown and a string of state-level election wins would force Republicans to accept an extension of the subsidies, which expire at year’s end.
Instead, Democratic leaders accused Republicans of caving to Trump’s demands without securing protections for health coverage. In a farewell floor speech, Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill, who was just elected governor of New Jersey, urged colleagues not to become “a ceremonial red stamp” for an administration that “takes food away from children and rips away healthcare.”
Republicans insisted that reopening the government had to come first. “We just spent 40 days and I still don’t know what the plotline was,” said Arizona Representative David Schweikert, likening the standoff to a “Seinfeld” episode, and then asked, “What’s happened now when rage is policy?”
Public opinion seems close to evenly divided. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week showed 50% of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown, while 47% blamed Democrats.
The package also includes new privacy protections for senators’ phone records, and sets up a forthcoming House fight over whether to release additional records tied to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
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