In Congress’ last action of the year, the Senate passed a funding patch early Saturday with more than $110 billion in disaster aid, averting a government shutdown and closing out the 118th Congress.
Final passage of the bill, which made it through the House Friday evening, caps off a tumultuous week on Capitol Hill as Speaker Mike Johnson managed the last-minute demands of President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk, along with the ensuing furor of congressional Democrats whose votes are needed to pass funding bills amid conservative opposition. While the speaker abandoned his initial bipartisan deal with Democrats at Trump’s and Musk’s urging, he failed to fulfill the president-elect’s demand for lifting the debt limit.
The end result is a spending patch that retains some of the initial bipartisan accord, including funding the government at current levels through March 14, more than $110 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension of agriculture and food policy. But more than 1,000 pages of policy were ultimately nixed from the bill at Trump’s and Musk’s behest, including restrictions on U.S. investments in China, stricter rules on deceptive advertising of tickets for events and new rules for pharmacy benefit managers, aimed at lowering prescription drug prices for Americans.
Congressional Democrats, howling about the way the two billionaire businessmen pressured and threatened Republicans into backtracking on the agreement, largely voted in favor of the package in the end.
“It feels to me there were a lot of things that were not great for billionaires and corporations that dropped out of this bill. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Friday night before voting for the bill.
After days of chaos in the House brought Congress right up to the government shutdown deadline, the Senate acted swiftly once the bill reached the upper chamber. “The president put his stamp on it, so let’s get ‘er done,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Friday night.
Senate leaders had to lock in an agreement from all 100 senators to fast-track the measure, just missing the midnight deadline, but with no functional impact on government operations.
Like their Democratic colleagues, many Republicans lamented policies deleted from the bill after Trump’s and Musk’s intervention. That includes language that would have OKed the year-round sale of so-called E-15 gasoline with a higher amount of ethanol, a major priority for lawmakers from corn-growing regions.
“I’m disappointed that E-15 wasn’t in there, very, very disappointed,” Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a member of Senate Republican leadership, said Friday night ahead of final passage. “But I do know that President Trump has been a great supporter of ethanol. So we’ll readdress it.”
The final bill also forgoes policy that would have forced social media companies to remove so-called revenge porn and intimate imagery posted without consent.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the sponsor of that policy, said the fact that Musk and Trump both own multi-billion-dollar social media companies is “completely unrelated” to the removal of the language.
Senators in both parties also expressed frustration about the removal of a policy cracking down on the practices of pharmacy benefit managers. The pharmaceutical industry lobbied against that language.
“Well, pharma tends to win, in the end. That’s been a consistent problem up here,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said. “So hopefully, in the new Congress, we’ll be able to do something about it.”
Almost three months after Hurricane Helene made landfall, the bill frees up billions of dollars in emergency funding for communities recovering from that storm as well as Hurricane Milton and other disasters like wildfires and severe flooding throughout the country in recent years. The Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program will be refilled, after running out of money in mid-October and pausing all new lending to businesses and homeowners in areas hit by disasters.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) tried for weeks to pass a standalone bill in the Senate that would have refilled the disaster loan program. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) repeatedly blocked requests for fast-track passage without a vote to offset the bill’s cost.
“I’m frustrated,” Tillis said Friday evening. “I think that was just an unforced error. We could have done it sooner.”
But the North Carolina senator said the more than $110 billion in disaster aid under the bill is “a big lift” that will deliver necessary help to disaster survivors.
“That’s exactly what I’d hoped for,” Tillis added.
Under the measure, the new mid-March funding deadline will keep the Pentagon and non-defense agencies running on current budgets for almost three more months, allowing the incoming Trump administration to be more formally involved in a final deal for fiscal 2025, which will be almost halfway over by then.
