Republicans fail to pass spending bill in House in setback for Trump

Donald Trump suffered a humiliating setback on Thursday when Republicans in Congress failed to pass a pared-down spending bill – just one day before a potential government shutdown that could disrupt Christmas travel.

By a vote of 174-235, the House of Representatives rejected the Trump-backed package, hastily assembled by Republican leaders after the president-elect and his billionaire ally Elon Musk scuttled a prior bipartisan deal.

Critics described the breakdown as an early glimpse of the chaos to come when Trump returns to the White House on 20 January. Musk’s intervention via a volley of tweets on his social media platform X was mocked by Democrats as the work of “President Musk”.

“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, told reporters. “It’s laughable. Extreme Maga Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”

Despite Trump’s support, 38 Republicans voted against the new package along with nearly every Democrat, ensuring that it failed to reach the two-thirds threshold needed for passage and leaving the next steps uncertain.

The defiance from within Trump’s own party caught many by surprise.

The latest bill would have extended government funding into March, when Trump will be in the White House and Republicans will control both chambers of Congress. It also would have provided $100bn in disaster relief and suspended the debt. Republicans dropped other elements that had been included in the original package, such as a pay raise for members of Congress and new rules for pharmacy benefit managers.

At Trump’s urging, the new version also would have suspended limits on the national debt for two years – a move that would make it easier to pass the dramatic tax cuts he has promised and set the stage for the federal government’s $36tn in debt to continue to climb.

Before the vote, Democrats and Republicans warned that the other party would be at fault if Congress allowed the government to shut down.

Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, told reporters that the package would avoid disruption, tie up loose ends and make it easier for Congress to cut spending by hundreds of billions of dollars when Trump takes office next year. “Government is too big, it does too many things, and it does few things well,” he said.

But Democrats dismissed the bill as a cover for a budget-busting tax cut that would largely benefit wealthy backers such as Musk, the world’s richest man,…