Furloughed federal workers stand in line for hours ahead of a special food distribution by the Capital Area Food Bank and No Limits Outreach Ministries on Barlowe Road in Hyattsville, Maryland, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House plans to approve a stopgap spending bill Wednesday evening that will end the record-breaking 43-day government shutdown once President Donald Trump signs the legislation.
Democrats are expected to oppose the package en masse, though a few centrists may vote for it, despite party leaders whipping against the measure. The House action will be the first time members, who left town while the Senate struggled to pass a stopgap spending bill and curtail the shutdown, have voted since Sept. 19.
House Republican leaders need nearly all of their members to back the deal after the balance of power in the House shifted to 219-214 once Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., swore in Arizona Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva.
Two GOP lawmakers — Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz — voted against the original version of the short-term spending bill when it passed the House in September. Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine voted for that bill, the only member of his party to do so.
The Senate significantly reworked it into what is now a 394-page package, adding in three of the full-year government funding bills and changing the date of the stopgap measure to Jan. 30, among many other provisions. The original stopgap was set to last through Nov. 21.
The change will give Congress a couple more months to work out agreement on the remaining nine appropriations bills that were supposed to become law before the start of the current fiscal year on Oct. 1.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing that Trump “looks forward to finally ending this devastating Democrat shutdown with his signature and we hope that signing will take place later tonight.”
Health care costs
Trump will then turn his attention toward the rising cost of health care that Democrats highlighted during the shutdown, Leavitt said, though she didn’t put a firm timeline on when he’ll release any plans.
“Once the government reopens, the president, as he’s always maintained, is absolutely open to having conversations about health care,” Leavitt said. “And I think you’ll see the president putting forth some really good policy proposals that Democrats should take very seriously to fix, again, the system that they broke.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters following a closed-door meeting that Democrats will try to get the necessary signatures on a discharge petition to force a floor vote on legislation to extend tax credits for three years for people who buy their health insurance from the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
The New York Democrat said the extension mirrors how long the enhanced tax credits were set to last initially in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Temporary health care subsidies were originally passed as part of the COVID-19-era American Rescue Plan in 2021 for two years. The Inflation Reduction Act, the signature climate policy bill from the Biden administration, then extended those health care subsidies for three years, expiring at the end of December 2025.
“The legislation that we will introduce in the context of a discharge petition will provide that level of certainty to working-class Americans who are on the verge of seeing their premiums, co-pays and deductibles skyrocket,” Jeffries said.
Democrats will need the support of at least a handful of Republicans in order to get the 218 signatures needed to force a vote on the bill. The discharge petition was released mid-afternoon.
Senate floor vote pledged on ACA tax credits
Democrats said for weeks ahead of the Oct. 1 shutdown deadline they wouldn’t provide the support needed to move the House-passed, short-term spending bill over the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster unless GOP leaders negotiated over the ACA tax credits.
Speaker Johnson said those talks wouldn’t happen during a shutdown and referred to it as an end-of-year issue, though he has repeatedly declined to say if he’ll hold a floor vote on the expiring subsidies in the weeks ahead.
Ramifications of the shutdown worsened the longer it went on through flight cancellations, delayed payments to U.S. Department of Agriculture nutrition programs and no pay for federal workers, just to name a few.
Seven centrist Senate Democrats and one independent, concerned about the shutdown’s impact on their constituents, broke with party leaders this weekend to advance the reworked spending package and then voted to approve the legislation Monday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who said throughout the shutdown he was interested in a bipartisan path forward on health insurance costs after the shutdown ended, committed to hold a floor vote on a Democratic bill “no later than the second week in December.”
What’s in the new bill
The spending package wraps in several different bills and provisions, such as the three full-year funding bills that cover the Agriculture Department, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Legislative Branch, military construction projects and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Included are:
- A stopgap spending bill that will keep the rest of the federal government running through Jan. 30;
- $30 million for the U.S. Capitol Police to enhance protections for lawmakers, $30 million for the U.S. Marshals Service to bolster security for members of the judicial and executive branches, and $28 million for enhanced safety for Supreme Court justices;
- Language requiring the Trump administration to reinstate the thousands of workers it sent layoff notices to during the shutdown and preventing officials from firing those workers through January;
- Provisions mandating the Trump administration provide back pay to all federal workers, including those furloughed during the shutdown. Trump at one point during the shutdown had threatened to yank that back pay, though it is required by law.
The Trump administration issued a Statement of Administration Policy a few hours before the House was scheduled to vote, saying the administration strongly supports the bill, describing the measure as “a fiscally responsible package that provides the full-year funding necessary to support the Nation’s veterans, farmers, and rural communities.”
The package also “ends disruptions to programs the American people rely on and ensures the thousands of Federal employees who have been forced to work without a paycheck, such as air traffic controllers, will be promptly paid,” the administration added.
The Agriculture and Military Construction-VA spending bills include tens of billions of dollars in earmarks requested by lawmakers from both political parties, important to them as midterm elections loom in 2026.
Separate vote planned on senators and subpoenas
But not every Republican on Capitol Hill is happy with how the full-year bills turned out.
Speaker Johnson announced mid-afternoon that the House would take a separate vote later this month to remove language from the package that will allow senators to file suit against the federal government if their data is subpoenaed.
“We are putting this legislation on the fast track suspension calendar in the House for next week,” Johnson wrote in a social media post.
The provision, tucked into the full-year Legislative Branch spending bill, is retroactive to January 1, 2022 and would apply to the eight senators who had their cell phone records subpoenaed during a 2023 investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The FBI reportedly obtained data for cell phone use between January 4 and January 7, 2021 for Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, as well as Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
Congress will likely try to finish work on the remaining nine full-year government spending bills by the Jan. 30 deadline set in the new stopgap spending bill.
Failure to broker a bipartisan deal that can pass both chambers of Congress before that deadline would lead to another government shutdown, though that would be partial and only affect the agencies included in those nine bills.
