Trump, Musk Throw Congress Into Chaos With Shutdown Looming
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump is still a month out from his inauguration but already is shaking up Washington, trashing House Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to avoid a government shutdown before the holidays and pressuring Republicans to deal with the debt ceiling before he takes office.
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With less than two days until federal agencies shutter, House Republicans huddled Thursday in Johnson’s office and struggled to write a Plan B that could appease Trump and his agitator-in-chief, Elon Musk.
Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, left that meeting touting progress. “We’re moving in a good direction,” he told reporters. But Trump himself said he wanted to see a shutdown happen if the debt limit wasn’t extended or ended entirely.
“If we don’t get it, then we’re going to have a shutdown, but it’ll be a Biden shutdown,” he told ABC News, saying shutdowns only damage the sitting president.
Extending the limit on borrowing — a fraught topic that lawmakers hadn’t planned to address for several more months — is now actively under discussion, Cole said. But Democrats appeared to balk at the last minute demand, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries calling consideration of the debt limit “premature at best” during a press conference Thursday on Capitol Hill.
The last-minute scramble followed an extraordinary day Wednesday. Backroom spending discussions on Capitol Hill spilled out into an open clash on X, with Musk, the social media platform’s owner, denouncing the compromise Johnson had negotiated to keep funding going into next year.
The drama left Johnson, just days after sitting with the president-elect at the Army-Navy football outside Washington, meeting with allies in his Capitol office to come up with a new plan to keep the government financed and avoid the political pain of a shutdown before the funding deadline lapses on Friday night.
The House speaker’s perilous standing was underscored Thursday morning, when Trump told Fox News that the Louisiana Republican could “easily remain speaker” — if he “acts decisively and tough” to eliminate “traps” being set by Democrats. Some Republicans, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah, floated the notion of Musk himself taking the speaker’s gavel in the new Congress. Rules do not require the leader of the lower chamber to be elected to the House, though the speaker has been a lawmaker throughout all of US history.
Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday that he had discussed the package with Musk and fellow Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy on a text chain, indicating that none of them liked the spending in the measure. Johnson said he tried to relay the reality of the situation: He needed Democratic votes.
But Musk throughout the day fired off a barrage of posts on X calling for a shutdown if Republicans couldn’t strike a deal more to his liking.
Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance delivered the final blow late in the afternoon with a joint post assailing the proposal and calling for a new approach that would bring in the fraught issue of raising the debt ceiling. Soon after, Trump threatened to actively oppose the reelection of any Republicans who supported the legislation.
The debt ceiling had been an issue legislators didn’t expect to have to confront until next year, and certainly wasn’t on their pre-holiday agenda. On Thursday, Trump told NBC News that abolishing the debt ceiling entirely would be the “smartest thing” lawmakers could do.
“I support that entirely,” he said.
Trump got an unexpected endorsement of that idea from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who posted on X that Congress should end the debt limit. But Jeffries cast the move as ploy by Trump to advance his tax agenda next year to the benefit of corporations and wealthy Americans.
“GOP extremists want House Democrats to raise the debt ceiling so that House Republicans can lower the amount of your Social Security check,” Jeffries posted on Bluesky. “Hard pass.”
Vance spent about an hour in Johnson’s office on Wednesday night. “We had a productive conversation,” he told reporters. “I think we’ll solve some problems here.”
Johnson later left the Capitol without answering questions.
Republicans representing states and districts set to benefit from disaster relief — such has hard-hit western North Carolina — began demanding that it not fall by the wayside.
“I’ll use every tool available to block a CR that fails Western North Carolina communities in need of long-term certainty,” Senator Thom Tillis, who is up for reelection in 2026 in the toss-up state, said on X, referring to the measure, known as a continuing resolution.
The spending vote this week had been expected to be relatively free of drama, as neither the incoming unified Republican majority nor the Democrats currently in control of the Senate and White House wanted a showdown as the holidays loomed. But the bill included more than $100 billion in disaster aid and other sweeteners, such as a pay raise for lawmakers, drawing the ire of Musk, who Trump has named to lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency to bring major expenditure cuts.
Now, both funding the government and Johnson’s speakership — which he’s only held since October 2023 — hang in the balance.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, in a statement on Wednesday night, said “triggering a damaging government shutdown would hurt families who are gathering to meet with their loved ones and endanger the basic services Americans from veterans to Social Security recipients rely on.”
“A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word,” she added.
Trump’s latest gambit comes almost six years to the day after his demand for funding for a border wall on another December temporary spending bill led to the longest government shutdown in American history — 35 days. Trump ultimately agreed to reopen the government without getting money for the wall.
Earlier: Trump Breaks With Johnson on Funding Bill, Wants Debt Limit Vote
The new Congress convenes on Jan. 3 and must elect a speaker, a process that requires a majority of the members who vote. Johnson can spare very few Republican votes if he wants to hold onto his job.
“Look, I like Mike. He’s a great, Christian guy,” Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a House Freedom Caucus member, said on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power.” “What’s happened has not helped his chances.”
Norman, however, acknowledged that a day in politics is a lifetime, and the speaker vote is still more than two weeks away.
“We will see when Jan. 3 comes along and see what happens,” he added.
In the meantime, Musk, a formidable power in the Republican Party through his vast wealth and control of X, took a victory lap Wednesday as Johnson’s deal teetered.
“The voice of the people was heard. This was a good day for America,” he said on X.
--With assistance from Kailey Leinz and Daniel Flatley.
(Updates with Trump, Jeffries comments in third through fifth paragraph.)
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