How Trump and Musk Set off the Shutdown Crisis, But Got Little in Return

The Washington Post / Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianna Sotomayor, Marianne LeVine, Liz Goodwin

16:11 JST, December 22, 2024

Some time after Donald Trump won the Nov. 5 election, he told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he wanted the federal debt limit taken care of before he took office, according to people close to both leaders. That’s all they agree on.

After that, the accounts diverge. Multiple House Republican lawmakers said the president-elect mentioned eliminating the debt ceiling casually and in passing, and that he understood Johnson’s explanation that the proposal didn’t have the votes to pass. Hill Republicans broadly agreed that no one got the impression Trump was repeatedly and clearly demanding that they raise the debt ceiling before Christmas. His sudden red line Wednesday reverberated across the Capitol, shocking House and Senate Republicans.

Advisers to Trump, though, said he had made his position clear to Johnson for weeks or even a month – long before going public Wednesday with the demand that upended the lame-duck congressional session and brought the government to the brink of shutting down.

The last-minute scramble recalled several episodes from Trump’s first term where he blew up, or nearly blew up, must-pass bills at the last minute. This time around, Trump did not get his way on the debt limit – even as his allies claimed victory – while Johnson averted a shutdown but rankled many Republicans whose support he’ll need to keep his gavel with the slimmest of majorities. The fallout is poised to carry over into next year as Trump seeks a bargain with GOP hard-liners to get rid of the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts.

“Get ready for Trump time,” Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pennsylvania) said Thursday, then referring to Johnson: “Mistakes were made. There wasn’t enough communication or enough specific communication. What happened yesterday shouldn’t have happened.”

This account of the past tumultuous week of fiscal brinkmanship in Congress is based on interviews with 34 lawmakers, advisers and aides, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The last time Johnson averted a government shutdown, in late September, he publicly said his plan for the lame duck post-election period was to pass another straightforward funding extension into mid-March. The only addition would be relief funds for survivors of natural disasters, driven by the aftermath of Hurricanes Milton and Helene.

Johnson was so adamant about the plan that he rejected public calls from Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota) to clear the decks for, at that time, a potential Trump presidency by passing a full-year funding bill including a debt ceiling hike.

Throughout the negotiations, another request emerged from farm-state Republicans to include agricultural aid, which soon became a priority of Johnson’s and Trump’s.

Then on Dec. 14, he attended the Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium outside Washington, watching from a VIP box with incoming Senate Republican leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and mega-billionaire donor Elon Musk, who has scarcely left Trump’s side since the election. The conversations were focused on the legislative agenda for next year and how the team preferred two reconciliation bills, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Trump and his team did not bring up the debt ceiling, the people said.

A person close to Trump said he brought up the debt ceiling in every conversation with Johnson, and said Johnson told the president-elect that he did have votes for a deal that included the debt ceiling.

“Anybody who says that’s a surprise just wasn’t listening,” the first Trump adviser said of the president-elect’s desire to clear the debt limit. “Johnson did not fully appreciate the situation. I think he gets it now.”

Johnson returned from the game with no mention of the debt ceiling, another person involved in the talks said, but was insistent that the spending package include farm aid.

Once Johnson granted that exception, Democrats clamored to add more items to the spending deal while they still control the Senate. The Democrats sought to transfer control of the RFK Stadium site to the D.C. government, fund reconstruction of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge and regulate pharmacy benefit managers.

Johnson’s hold on the gavel was immediately in peril. He committed an error that ultimately cost his predecessor the speakership: breaking a promise to his chaotic and ideologically unpredictable Republican conference.

Lawmakers were irate when Johnson laid out details about his bicameral and bipartisan proposal in a Tuesday morning meeting. When Johnson described it as a collaborative process, Ways and Means Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-Missouri) exclaimed “not true,” according to people in the room.

To make matters worse, the furor extended to a wide stretch of the fractious conference. Several Republican lawmakers noted the strangeness of seeing Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, and moderate Rep. Michael Lawler (R-New York) trashing Johnson’s proposal during the meeting with equal fervor.

“If we were going to do a CR, it should have been a clean CR with disaster, and call it a day,” Lawler said later of the spending package, known as a “continuing resolution,” or CR. “The moment you open the door, you would have been better off just doing the appropriations [process] and getting that off the table so that it is not impacting the first 100 days of the administration.”

House Republicans started revolting over the lengthening add-ons to the spending bill. Several hard-liners, who have long pushed for agency-by-agency spending bills rather than loading up big must-pass deals on deadline, started discussing the possibility of withholding their support for Johnson when he runs for speaker on Jan. 3 and floated backing Emmer or Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for the post. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) said publicly he’d vote no, meaning that all 218 other Republicans would have to vote for Johnson to ensure he regains the gavel.

Johnson’s team began to realize that the GOP backlash was so harsh that bringing the bill to the floor could imperil his speakership, echoing the frustrations that brought down his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy.

Several people close to Johnson say the speaker talked frequently with the president-elect and kept him abreast of ongoing negotiations. But another Trump adviser described him as blindsided by the bill’s contents and furious. The first adviser said the president-elect was with Musk at the time, and Trump told NBC he encouraged Musk to post messages condemning the bill.

“I told him that if he agrees with me, that he could put out a statement,” Trump said.

But two people familiar with the situation say that Trump and Johnson were on a call Wednesday morning where the president-elect did not express displeasure with the proposal.

Musk posted a torrent of complaints about the bill on his social media site X, picking up House Republican hard-liner’s objection to the RFK Stadium transfer – which ironically would move the Washington Commanders from Northwest Stadium where the Army-Navy game was played – and falsely adding items that the bill never included, such as billions of dollars for Ukraine aid.

Johnson was also texting throughout the day about the spending deal with Musk and his sidekick on the cost-cutting initiative known as the “Department of Government Efficiency,” investor Vivek Ramaswamy.

Support for the proposal was already crumbling on Capitol Hill before Trump weighed in.

“The CR blew up because it … fell under its own weight,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) said. “I’m not sure even if the president said nothing that it was going to pass.”

Later on Wednesday, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance followed up with their own statement attacking the spending deal, but it mainly focused on demanding that the debt ceiling be raised.

“President Trump hates the debt ceiling vote. He hates it,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma). “Hated it while he was president, and doesn’t want to do it. He was upset … that that would land at the beginning of his next presidency and doesn’t want to deal with it.”

Trump called several reporters threatening a government shutdown, and several advisers said he was determined to force it now rather than during his presidency. President Joe Biden was not deeply involved in the spending deal negotiations.

But Trump did not go so far as to personally lobby lawmakers and did not want to “die on this hill,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming). “If he himself had picked up the phone and made a bunch of calls, the result would have been different.”

Johnson took on the directive from Trump, trimming down the initial proposal and tacking on a two-year debt ceiling hike to clear the decks ahead of Trump’s return to the White House.

“SUCCESS in Washington,” Trump quipped about the second proposal that would pan out not to be a success.

Johnson’s early warnings that he didn’t have the votes to raise the debt ceiling became painfully clear on Thursday when the second proposal failed: 38 Republicans voted against it, with many more angry at the debt ceiling being part of the conversation.

Trump advisers in the room with lawmakers – including many who shuffled in and out of the speaker’s suite that day – said often that Trump was insistent on including aid to farmers in the funding bill and was okay if the debt ceiling was not part of final negotiations, as long as there was an agreement to address it early in the new year.

But getting to an agreement proved difficult as members of the House Freedom Caucus insisted that raising the debt ceiling should include cuts in federal spending to reduce the deficit. It’s a consistent demand that has plagued spending negotiations this congressional term.

Several Republicans noted that Johnson appeared more stressed than past negotiations, but that he pressed on to find a compromise. He quipped a joke he’s often repeated throughout the year – that if anyone else can get 218 votes to become House speaker, “God bless them.”

A handshake agreement was made Friday to address the debt ceiling in the new year. Johnson flashed the draft agreement in a House GOP conference meeting that afternoon that said they would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion in a packaged deal that would include Trump’s border security and economic reform asks, “with an agreement that we will cut $2.5 trillion in net mandatory spending” throughout the legislative process.

Many House Republicans, particularly those responsible for allotting government spending, knew that was an impossible goal unless the party went against its campaign promise to not cut Medicare or Social Security. Hard-liners also knew an agreement in principle would likely be broken, but could no longer protest as the train was leaving the station on a funding bill that mirrored Thursday’s failed proposal, except that it no longer included the debt ceiling hike.

“They call that a gentleman’s agreement, but there are no gentlemen out here,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) said.

The version that Johnson proposed Friday returned to his original plan: extending current levels plus disaster relief only. But the RFK Stadium transfer, funding for pediatric cancer research, health care regulations and other additions were stripped out.

House Democrats once again became the key factor to unlocking whether the funding bill could pass. In their caucus meeting minutes before the House began voting on the bill early Friday evening, leaders sensed that – while Democratic lawmakers would likely vote for this deal because it stripped out the debt ceiling increase and included numerous provisions they supported – the caucus was done bailing out Republicans after this vote.

According to multiple Democrats familiar with the situation, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) told the caucus that Johnson rescinding the initial deal and closing off communication with Democrats at several points afterward proved that the relationship was damaged, possibly beyond repair. Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-California) also told Democrats he personally would never ask members to support Johnson moving forward.

All Democrats joined 170 Republicans to vote in favor of the bill Friday that required two-thirds supports to pass to the Senate. Without them, the bill would have failed as 34 Republicans voted against the measure.

Musk claimed victory, based on the bill’s text shrinking from 1,500 pages to just over 100. Most of the page savings came from removing the regulation on pharmacy benefit managers since health care rules are highly technical. But the overall cost of the bill changed little.

One other thing the final version didn’t include was any change to the debt ceiling. Despite Trump’s failure to achieve his top priority demand, his allies claimed victory by arguing that he clarified where lawmakers stood and put pressure on hard-liners and Musk to come up with proposed savings, which they want, in exchange for raising the debt limit, which Trump wants.

“Without President Trump, the American people would have been stuck with a 1,500-page bill full of Democrat pork and pay raises for members of Congress,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said. “President Trump did more to secure this legislative victory as President-elect than the sitting President Joe Biden.”

As for Johnson, several members of the Freedom Caucus began to cast doubt on his chances of being reelected speaker. With Massie publicly saying he wouldn’t support him, Johnson cannot lose a single Republican to wield the gavel again.

Johnson said he spoke on the phone Friday night with Trump and Musk, joking with the latter, “Hey, you want to be speaker of the House?”

“I don’t know.” Johnson said Musk responded, “This may be the hardest job in the world.”

Johnson added: “I think it is. But we’re going to get through this.”

At 1:15 a.m. on Saturday, the Senate unanimously agreed to a stand-alone bill to transfer RFK Stadium to D.C., which passed the House in February. The legislation included no giveaways for the city, as Musk alleged. The funding for pediatric cancer research that fell out of the spending package also passed separately with unanimous consent. In the end, neither Trump nor Musk got much of what they had demanded.