The winners and losers in the fight to keep the government open

As the clock ticked down late Friday night, the US House and Senate finally passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the government operating for another two months. The passage came after two failed attempts by Republican House speaker Mike Johnson to push through earlier versions of the bill. Any additional delays would have led to a temporary shutdown of some non-essential government functions. Essential functions, like the military, would have continued to operate.

What can we learn from this shambolic, last-minute process?

First, the good news. The first two bills failed because they contained a trainload of pork, a steaming pile of non-essential provisions that rank-and-file Republicans refused to support. When conservative Republicans and their public supporters discovered those provisions, they revolted. Top Republican lawmakers had already approved the bills, but they couldn’t convince their colleagues to go along. After so many Republicans rejected the bills, the Democrats chose not to save them. They, too, voted “no,” even though most were pleased with the first two bills.

Why did House Democrats back away? For three good reasons. First, they could say, quite plausibly, “we had a deal and the other side broke it.” Second, they believed the government shutdown would be blamed on the Republicans, as all previous shutdowns had been. Third, they knew their finger-pointing would be aided by the mainstream media.

The Democrats’ calculations were partly correct, but not entirely. The media landscape has shifted dramatically. It’s no longer confined to the three major networks and the New York Times and Washington Post. They are still powerful voices, but their influence is fading. It has almost disappeared among Republicans, who pay more attention to the hundreds of bloggers and conservative podcasts who push back. It was this “new media” that exposed the special-interest pork inside the “must-pass” bills and fueled public opposition on the right.

In the past, it would have been hard to find the controversial provisions in the brief period between the bill’s presentation and the congressional vote. That, too, has changed, thanks to artificial intelligence (to find what’s in the bill) and blogs and social media to expose the newly-found secrets.

The principal tools were Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, which found the pork hidden throughout the lengthy bills, and his related platform for free speech, X, which allowed users to broadcast their outrage at what they found. The presence of X was vital. Throughout the Biden years, the administration had used its leverage over compliant social media to suppress information. This time, Musk and millions of users used open media for transparency.

These new tools, together with conservative lawmakers, changed the game for these last-minute bills. Those are usually the perfect vehicles for special-interest provisions. Opponents know it’s risky to defeat the entire bill and shut down the government, even temporarily. They know, too, that there’s little time to see what’s inside the bills. As Nancy Pelosi once said about the mammoth Obamacare bill, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” What she said in 2009 is less accurate in 2024, now that thousands of independent eyes are scanning the bills, using AI tools and blasting the results online. That’s exactly what they did to sink the first two bills.

Important as the new tools are, they won’t solve the underlying problem. The fundamental problem is how Congress operates, or, rather, fails to operate. That problem is far larger than the fight over this year’s must-pass bill. It’s a recurrent problem: Christmastime, Christmas-tree bills decorated with expensive ornaments, meant to be hidden from the public.

Bills like that are sent to the floor each year because Congress fails to perform its essential job of passing regular authorization and appropriation bills. Those “regular” bills should fund each government function and agency separately. They ought to arrive on the floor after hearings by specific committees, such as Agriculture, and detailed funding measures passed by the Appropriations Committee. That process has been broken for years, leading to these emergency “Continuing Resolutions” (CRs) and omnibus bills to keep the doors open. These hurried, patchwork bills typically arrive as government funding is about to expire and Congress is rushing to adjourn for the holidays. It’s an annual train wreck, and it needs to stop.

Congress doesn’t have much to do — it has offloaded most real legislation to the regulatory agencies — but does need to perform its essential functions of overseeing government agencies and funding them to perform specific tasks. That is Congress’s main job, and it hasn’t performed it for years. The regular appropriations process has broken down. That’s why we have these thousand-page CRs and omnibus spending bills, shoved onto the floor when cingressmen are eager to return home for the holidays. Amid this rush, detailed oversight is nearly impossible and mischief nearly inevitable.

Congressional leaders and well-connected lobbyists take full advantage of the circumstances. They know these CRs are urgently needed, so they keep the details hidden until the last minute. Then they release the final product, filling hundreds of pages with technical language and giving outsiders little time to discover what’s hidden within. In this case, the outsiders are not only taxpayers but ordinary members of Congress, who weren’t involved in the secret negotiations. The powerful leaders and lobbyists figure everyone will fall in line to avoid a government shutdown. They are usually right.

Not this year. Donald Trump opposed the initial bill, a position voiced by his principal budget-cutters, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, with help from a lesser-known name, Russell Vought, who will head the Office of Management and Budget. Vought headed OMB during the first Trump administration and knows where all the financial bodies are buried.

They were joined by “back-bench” Republicans who finally saw all the pork and didn’t like it, some because of their principles, others because their own special projects were not included. They voted “no,” supported by hundreds of bloggers and podcasters who scanned the bill for trouble and found plenty of it.

Democrats, thinking (rightly) that Republicans had reneged on their bargain, voted “no,” too. They hoped to shift all the public opprobrium onto the Republicans, a tactic that usually worked, and especially onto Trump, whose opposition was visible.

The final bill passed only after two larger, pork-laden bills failed. The final, slimmed-down bill funds the government for a couple of months, includes some crucial funding for disaster relief, and cut out the special-interest provisions packed into earlier versions.

Although the effort to saddle Trump with a government shutdown failed, the final bill was only a partial victory for the incoming administration. Its passage contains two troubling messages for the new team. The first is that the slimmed-down bill does not raise the debt ceiling, as earlier versions had. That’s bad news for Trump, who will need to raise that ceiling sometime in 2025.

The prospect of raising the debt celing has flipped the old political alignments. Democrats have long favored ending the debt-ceiling provision entirely. Republicans have long favored keeping it to restrain spending. Now, their positions are reversed. Why? Because Democrats know Trump will need to raise the limit and can demand some concessions in return for their votes. That’s why House Democrats wanted that provision removed from the CR and got that concession in return for their votes. Trump himself complained about the absence of that provision in the final bill.

Second, almost three dozen Republicans refused to approve the final bill, despite Trump and his aides urging them to vote for it. In fact, the bill got more “yes” votes from House Democrats than from Republicans, a recurrent feature of Speaker Mike Johnson’s “must-pass” bills. That, too, is bad news for the incoming administration.

Currently, House Republicans have only a single-vote majority. The margin will increase slightly this spring after special elections to replace members who joined the Trump administration. Those elections are in secure Republican districts. Even with those new members, the Republicans will have only a tiny majority.

That narrow margin gives enormous negotiating leverage to both recalcitrant Republicans and Democrats, whom the speaker (and the president) will need to pass bills. The problem is that those two groups have fundamentally conflicting goals. The most recalcitrant Republicans are “small-government” types on the right. Cut, cut, cut. They are opposed by “big-government” Democrats on the left. Spend, spend, spend.

That split, together with the Republicans’ tiny margin in the House, spells trouble for the incoming Trump administration. So does the fact that so many Republicans refused to vote for a final bill Trump supported, albeit reluctantly. (He wanted the debt ceiling included.)

The whole process shows what a thankless job the House speaker has, and it casts an ominous shadow across the incoming Trump administration. The obvious conclusion is that the White House will have to rely on Executive Orders, not on laws passed by a dysfunctional Congress. That’s no way to run a railroad.