President Donald Trump signed a stopgap funding bill to reopen the government Wednesday evening, finally ending the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history, which has roiled Washington since October 1.
The legislation, which passed the House earlier Wednesday evening 220 to 209, will fund the government through January 30 and fund military construction, the legislative branch, and the Agriculture Department for most of 2026. Six centrist House Democrats voted in favor of the bill and two Republicans — Representatives Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) and Greg Steube (R., Fla.) — voted against it.
The House had been on an extended recess for weeks after clearing a stopgap funding bill in late September to fund the government through November 21. Since then, Senate Majority Leader John Thune brought that House-passed legislation to the floor more than a dozen times, only for all but three members of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D., N.Y.) caucus — Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.), John Fetterman (D., Pa.), and Angus King (I., Maine) — to oppose the bill every time it came up for a vote.
Their decision to withhold votes centered around their desire to pair any government funding bill with legislative language to extend the expiring enhanced Affordable Care Act Subsidies that were created and temporarily extended by Democrats through 2025.
For weeks, Senate GOP leaders had made clear that they would not negotiate a potential deal to extend the temporary subsidies in the context of a closed government. And as the shutdown dragged on, Trump increased pressure on Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold for passing legislation so that his party could pass the stopgap funding bill without Democratic support — a demand that few Senate Republicans support.
In the end, the pressure to reopen the government convinced the requisite number of Democrats to cave, giving Republicans enough votes to clear a filibuster. Late Sunday evening, five more Democrats broke ranks and joined Republicans in advancing the new package to fund the government through January 30.
They did so without any major concessions from Republicans, save for a handful of legislative sweeteners, such as rehiring federal workers who were laid off at the start of the shutdown and a pledge by Thune to hold a vote on legislative language surrounding some sort of ACA subsidy extension by mid-December. But that pledge to bring legislation to the floor notably does not include a promise from Senate GOP leadership that there will be sufficient Republican support for any such legislation to clear a filibuster in the Senate, let alone pass the House.
“There are a handful” of Senate Republicans, “obviously, that are open to doing something and some sort of an extension with reforms,” Thune told National Review in a sit-down interview late last month.
But somewhere between 80 to 85 percent of congressional Republicans, he said, are fundamentally opposed to extending the subsidies in any fashion, even with reforms like income caps. “There’s a lot of reluctance to support a program that has really bad results,” he said.
The final stopgap funding bill included a Senate-drafted provision that would grant U.S. senators the ability to sue the Justice Department for up to half a million dollars in damages if their phone records were seized by the federal government without their knowledge as part of a probe. That provision was tucked into the Senate-drafted bill at Thune’s direction in response to demands by senators who had their phone records subpoenaed without their knowledge as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
In a bid to win over a small flank of House Republicans who strongly opposed that Senate-drafted legislative language, Speaker Mike Johnson introduced a standalone bill to repeal the provision next week following passage. Repealing that provision will of course require buy-in from senators — no small lobbying feat given senators pushed for its inclusion in the bill in the first place.
That pledge wasn’t enough for some House Republicans like Representative Greg Steube (R., Fla.), who voted against the stopgap funding bill over frustrations with that electronic records provision. “That does nothing to change the fact that certain senators will get paid an additional $500k of taxpayer money,” Steube wrote on social media ahead of the vote. “The Senate will never take up your ‘standalone’ bill. This is precisely why you shouldn’t let the Senate jam the House.”
Most congressional Democrats are furious that a handful of their Senate colleagues, two of whom are retiring at the end of their terms and none of whom are up for reelection in 2026, caved to what some are calling Republicans’ “pinky promise” to hold a vote on Obamacare subsidies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries filed a discharge petition to trigger floor action on a bill that will extend the Obamacare subsidies for three years.
Over the weekend, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said he was “proud of the majority of Senate Democrats who opposed” the government funding package. In Senator Bernie Sanders’s (I., Vt.) view, “this was a very, very bad vote.”
A slew of Democratic 2028 presidential aspirants and 2026 Senate candidates have spent recent days taking swipes at Schumer for the deal, which his No. 2, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, (D., Ill.) supported. While Schumer did not personally vote in favor of the compromise stopgap funding bill like he did in March, Democrats are accusing the New York Democrat of either orchestrating the deal behind the scenes or failing to stop it.
“We are talking about a coordinated effort of eight senators with the knowledge of Leader Schumer, voting to break with the entire Democratic Party in exchange for nothing,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), long considered a potential Senate primary challenger to Schumer, told CNN on Wednesday.