The Senate early Saturday passed legislation to extend government funding through March 14, barely averting a shutdown with a vote coming just after the midnight deadline.
The measure, which also included $100 billion in aid for communities ravaged by natural disasters and $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, cleared the Senate on a 85-11 vote.
It now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law after the House passed it Friday evening in a 336-34 vote. The White House said Mr. Biden will sign the legislation on Saturday, announcing that the Office of Management and Budget had ceased shutdown preparations and federal agencies should continue their normal operations.
The bipartisan votes in both chambers capped a week of drama around what should have been a simple three-month extension of government funding.
It started with congressional party leaders haggling over what unfinished bills they could add to the must-pass funding bill, delaying a planned Sunday release.
When the stopgap measure was finally released Tuesday evening, it clocked in at 1,547 pages, stunning rank-and-file lawmakers who were not party to the negotiations.
While many members on both sides of the aisle celebrated bipartisan agreements, ranging from a major crackdown on prescription drug middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers to restrictions on outbound investments to China, others balked at leadership’s decision to load up a simple funding extension with unrelated goodies.
Conservatives in particular decried the measure, which they likened to a traditional year-end omnibus spending measure that House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, promised he would avoid.
President-elect Donald Trump’s government efficiency advisors, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, slammed the bill on social media. And Mr. Musk threatened to use his personal wealth to fund primary opponents against any Republicans who voted for it.
That led Mr. Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance to weigh in and demand Republicans pare down the bill, removing “giveaways” to Democrats and leaving only the government funding extension and disaster and farm aid. But they also asked for a new demand: an extension of the debt limit.
By Wednesday night, Mr. Johnson had pulled the plug on the bipartisan deal. On Thursday, he went to the floor with a version of Mr. Trump’s slimmed-down plan, but it failed with 38 Republicans and all but two Democrats voting against it.
Republicans regrouped on Friday and spent hours negotiating among themselves, ultimately deciding to drop the two-year extension of the debt limit from the failed slimmed-down bill.
To appease Mr. Trump, they promised to raise the borrowing limit through the partisan budget reconciliation process next year, along with trillions in spending cuts to win over conservatives who opposed a clean debt limit hike.
Democrats said they would have preferred the original bipartisan deal but ultimately accepted the pared-down measure once the debt limit suspension Mr. Trump demanded was removed.
As for the bipartisan measures that got left behind, lawmakers are holding out hope for action next Congress.
“I think we take them back up again when we get back,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire Democrat, said.
