Nearly halfway into the fiscal year, House Republicans gave up Tuesday and passed an extension of spending primarily at 2024 levels, saying they wanted to turn the page and start on President Trump’s agenda.
They cut from a few programs and increased funding for Republican priorities, such as immigration enforcement and the military.
The measure, known as a continuing resolution, or “CR” in Washington-speak, passed on a 217-213 vote. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, joined all but one Republican in support.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, called the bill the best of bad options this late in the fiscal year, given political divisions within his party and Democrats’ eagerness to hang a loss on Mr. Trump.
“I did what we had to do, what was necessary, what we could get 218 votes for,” Mr. Johnson said. “This is a totally different scenario. By doing the CR this time, it actually is the responsible play and the conservative play because we are conserving the resources of the American people.”
The bill marked a retreat for Mr. Johnson, who had promised not to accept a continuing resolution.
Mr. Trump’s backing of the measure proved the deciding factor in persuading fiscal hawks weary of supporting stopgaps.
Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, cast the party’s sole no vote. Mr. Trump threatened to “lead the charge” to find a candidate to replace him in the 2026 election.
Mr. Massie shrugged it off. He noted that when he was the only Republican to vote against Mr. Trump’s COVID-19 relief bill in 2020, he received the same threat but won reelection with 81% of the vote.
“The missives directed at me weren’t to try to get me to change my vote. I never change my vote,” Mr. Massie said. “I think they were to try to keep the other Republicans in line until they get this over to the Senate, where you’re going to find out what a stinker it is when you get like 10 or 15 Democrats over there to vote for something that the Freedom Caucus endorsed over here.”
In the Republican-run Senate, the bill will need Democratic votes to clear the 60-vote threshold to survive, but Democrats will be under pressure to stop a partial government shutdown.
Congress’ deadline to fund the government is Friday, when funding expires from a stopgap measure passed in December. The bill funds the government through the end of September.
Republicans said the bill cut $13 billion from nondefense spending and boosted defense spending by roughly $6 billion over last year’s levels. It gives the Pentagon wiggle room over an additional $8 billion in funds that can be moved and shifted toward priority programs and contracts.
The continuing resolution also boosts veterans’ health care by $6 billion to avoid a costly shortfall that officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs warned of last year and continues the pay increase for service members passed in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act.
The bill includes more than $9 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a slight bump from the previous year’s spending, and more than a $500 million increase for the government’s nutritional program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC.
Republicans said the bill did not adopt any controversial new policy provisions.
Rep. Ryan Zinke, Montana Republican and a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he would prefer to pass spending bills rather than use a stopgap, but he appreciated the increases in defense spending.
“This is as good as we’re going to get,” said Mr. Zinke. “And the alternative, quite frankly, is shutting down the government.”
Despite the money for the VA and WIC, Democrats panned the measure as a “blank check” for the Trump administration that would hurt veterans and low-income Americans and kneecapped Army Corps of Engineers projects.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, warned that the Republicans’ stopgap bill “does nothing” to protect Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Although the latter two entitlement programs fall under the mandatory spending category, which Congress does not control, Republicans have proposed cost-saving changes to Medicaid in their budget plan.
“You want to take a chain saw to these priorities,” Mr. Jeffries said.
Republican leadership and Mr. Trump have said that none of those programs would be touched, but the president’s efficiency czar, Elon Musk, said Monday night that entitlement programs constitute the bulk of federal spending and that they would be “the big one to eliminate.”
The House and Senate appropriations committee chairs would have preferred passing regular spending bills. Instead, the focus shifted to fiscal 2026, which begins Oct. 1. Those bills will hinge on Mr. Trump’s budget, which is expected in April.
“We really can’t start without it,” said House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, Oklahoma Republican. “We don’t have a top line yet. We don’t have a presidential budget.”
