Senate Passes Package to End Shutdown, Sending It Back to House

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history came one step closer to an end on Monday night as the Senate voted to pass a bill to fund most federal agencies through January despite no extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act credits that Democrats had spent weeks arguing were a crucial part of any deal.

The bill, which temporarily extends funding at current levels, passed the Senate by a 60-to-40 vote with eight members of the Democratic caucus joining nearly all Republicans in voting in favor, sending the bill back to the Republican-led House where it is expected to pass after more than a dozen failed votes in the Senate. 

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House Speaker Mike Johnson urged lawmakers to return to Washington “as quickly as possible” ahead of a planned vote as early as Wednesday. Johnson has kept the House out of session since mid-September after Republicans passed a bill to continue government funding. The bill must pass the House before it can be signed by President Donald Trump, who on Monday said he approved the plan.

“We’ll be opening up our country very quickly,” Trump said at the White House, praising the deal as “very good.”

Once approved, the short-term deal will provide immediate financial relief for about 700,000 federal workers who have been furloughed or on the job without pay for more than a month. It also includes a provision that reverses the thousands of firings of federal workers initiated by the Trump Administration since the shutdown began, and forbids additional firings at least through the end of January. 

The expected reopening also eases pressures on the airline industry, which was grappling with staffing shortfalls in airport security and air-traffic control, resulting in delays at major airports across the country just two weeks ahead of the busy Thanksgiving travel season. It also restores funding for food aid under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, after the Trump Administration withheld full federal funding for food stamps.

“I could talk for hours about all the problems we’ve seen,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on the Senate floor on Monday morning. “The American people have suffered for long enough.”

The package also includes full-year funding for the Agriculture Department, military construction, and the legislative branch.

The agreement the small group of Senate Democrats reached with Republicans marks a retreat from the hard-line stance their party had taken throughout the shutdown, which began on Oct. 1 over a clash between Democrats and Trump over whether to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act credit. Those subsidies, which were introduced during the COVID pandemic, are set to expire at the end of the year and could leave as many as 22 million Americans with significantly higher monthly health insurance premiums if Congress does not extend them. Open enrollment for next year started this month.

But after weeks of stalemate, divisions began to surface within the Democratic caucus over whether to continue holding out for a guaranteed extension. Trump had refused to negotiate on health care policy until the government reopened, and little progress had been made more than 40 days into the shutdown. Over the weekend, a group of moderate Senate Democrats agreed to reopen the government in exchange for a promise of a mid-December vote on the ACA subsidies—a significant retreat from their earlier demand for a guaranteed extension. The decision angered many progressives, who accused their colleagues of caving to the President.

The eight members of the Democratic caucus who backed the bill are mostly centrists, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Tim Kaine of Virginia, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, along with Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats. 

“This was the only deal on the table,” said Shaheen, one of the lead negotiators. “It was our best chance to reopen the government and immediately begin negotiations to extend the [Affordable Care Act] tax credits.”

For now, those negotiations remain uncertain. Speaker Johnson has said he will not commit to bringing up the subsidies extension in his chamber, and some Republicans have called for President Barack Obama’s signature health care law to be scrapped or overhauled altogether.

But perhaps most concerning for Democrats was that earlier on Monday night, the Senate voted 47-53 along party lines not to extend the ACA subsidies for one year—a potential preview of how the promised mid-December vote will unfold. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday had offered Republicans the same one-year extension of the enhanced subsidies—short of the permanent extension they had initially sought—but the Republican leadership rejected the idea and used it as leverage that Democrats were getting desperate. 

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has proposed redirecting some of the money for ACA subsidies directly to households rather than to insurers. Under his plan, the federal government would deposit funds into prefunded flexible-spending accounts that individuals could use to pay for premiums or out-of-pocket medical costs.

“Instead of paying insurance companies to manage more of our billions, why don’t we trust the American people to manage their own resources, to manage their own care?” said Cassidy, who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, while on the Senate floor on Monday. “If you had the choice of giving the money to the patient for her to manage or giving it to the insurance company, I think we should give it to the patient.”

While it remains unclear whether Cassidy’s proposal represents the official Republican position, the White House has signaled openness to the idea. “Why not take the people who have higher health care premiums and just mail them a check and let them decide?” said Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Some moderate Democrats have expressed willingness to discuss the concept, though others warn it could erode the stability of the ACA marketplaces by siphoning off healthy enrollees. Any ACA proposal would require Republican support to pass the House, where their majority will soon shrink to 219-to-214 after Adelita Grijalva is sworn in.

“We have a guaranteed vote by a guaranteed date on a bill that we will write—not that the Republicans will write,” Shaheen said on Sunday. “Although it is important for us to engage with them, because we need a bipartisan bill that we know is going to get connected to provide the relief that Americans need. I think there is a commitment on the part of many of our colleagues to do that.”

Schumer, who has led Senate Democrats for the last eight years, ultimately voted against the Republican funding bill and publicly warned that Democrats should not give up their leverage without securing firm commitments on health care. “This health care crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home that I cannot in good faith support this [continuing resolution] that fails to address the health care crisis,” he said before the vote.

He added that Democrats “will not give up this fight” and that his party “sounded the alarm” on health care.

But in failing to unite the party to hold firm until Republicans agreed to extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced tax credits, some Democrats felt that Schumer proved he could not match the President’s appetite for confrontation. “America deserves better,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X, adding in a later post that “now is not the time to roll over.”

“Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise—it’s capitulation,” added Texas Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a statement.

A handful of House Democrats even publicly called on Senate Democrats to pick a new leader. “The Democratic Party needs leaders who fight and deliver for working people. Schumer should step down,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat. “Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced,” added Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents the Silicon Valley region of California.

Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Monday night that Schumer “thought he could break the Republicans and the Republicans broke him.”

The criticism echoes backlash Schumer faced in March, when he supported a Republican spending bill to avert an earlier shutdown, prompting many of the same progressives to accuse him of capitulating too easily. At the time, Schumer argued that keeping the government open was the responsible course, warning that a prolonged impasse would ultimately strengthen Trump’s hand.

The latest revolt suggests that months later, despite strong results in last week’s elections, the party’s rift over how to confront the President has only deepened.