Government to reopen after 43 days: US House sends bill to Trump ending record shutdown
Furloughed federal workers stand in line for hours ahead of a special food distribution by the Capital Area Food Bank and No Limits Outreach Ministries on Barlowe Road in Hyattsville, Maryland, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
This report has been updated.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House approved a spending package Wednesday evening that will reopen the government and end the longest shutdown in the nation’s history, once President Donald Trump signs the legislation into law.
The White House announced Trump will sign the bill in the Oval Office at 9:45 p.m. Eastern.
The 222-209 vote marked the first time that chamber took up a bill since mid-September, when Republican leaders recessed after members approved a stopgap spending measure they knew couldn’t advance in the Senate.
That stalemate, centered around sharply rising health care costs, led to a 43-day shutdown that affected nearly every corner of the country through delayed funding for nutrition programs for millions of Americans, no pay for federal workers, flight delays tied to staffing shortages and much more.
But after nearly six weeks of failed procedural votes, seven centrist Senate Democrats and one independent broke with party leaders on Sunday to advance the reworked spending package and then voted to approve the legislation Monday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who said throughout the shutdown he was interested in a bipartisan path forward on health insurance costs after the shutdown ended, committed to hold a floor vote on a Democratic bill “no later than the second week in December.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said repeatedly throughout the funding lapse GOP lawmakers have ideas to improve the health care system. However, he didn’t detail any of those publicly and hasn’t committed to a floor vote.
House debate on the spending package that will reopen government was largely along party lines, though Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Greg Steube of Florida voted against the bill.
Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, Adam Gray of California, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state and Tom Suozzi of New York voted for passage.
Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., urged support for the legislation, saying “history reminds us that shutdowns never change the outcome.”
“Over the last 43 days the facts did not shift, the votes required did not shift, the path forward did not change,” Cole said. “The only thing that did move was the level of pain Democrats inflicted on the nation.”
Much higher premiums predicted
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the spending panel, rejected the legislation and said it does nothing to address the rising cost of health care.
“More than 20 million Americans will have to pay double, even triple, their monthly insurance premium in just a matter of weeks,” DeLauro said. “And this bill leaves families without even a glimmer of hope that their costs might go down.”
The Senate significantly reworked the stopgap bill the House originally passed in mid-September into what is now a 394-page package, adding in three of the full-year government funding bills and changing the date of the stopgap measure to Jan. 30, among many other provisions. The original stopgap was set to last through Nov. 21.
The updated measure gives Congress a couple more months to work out agreement on the remaining nine appropriations bills that were supposed to become law before the start of the current fiscal year on Oct. 1.
Lawmakers could create a partial government shutdown if they’re unable to agree on approving the remaining appropriations bill before the new government funding deadline at the end of January.
Democratic discharge petition
Trump will turn his attention toward the rising cost of health care that Democrats highlighted during the shutdown, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Wednesday briefing, though she didn’t put a firm timeline on when he’ll release any plans.
“Once the government reopens, the president, as he’s always maintained, is absolutely open to having conversations about health care,” Leavitt said. “And I think you’ll see the president putting forth some really good policy proposals that Democrats should take very seriously to fix, again, the system that they broke.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters following a closed-door meeting that Democrats will try to get the necessary signatures on a discharge petition to force a floor vote on legislation to extend tax credits for three years for people who buy their health insurance from the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
The New York Democrat said the extension mirrors how long the enhanced tax credits were set to last initially in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Temporary health care subsidies were originally passed as part of the COVID-19-era American Rescue Plan in 2021 for two years. The Inflation Reduction Act, the signature climate policy bill from the Biden administration, then extended those health care subsidies for three years, expiring at the end of December 2025.
“The legislation that we will introduce in the context of a discharge petition will provide that level of certainty to working-class Americans who are on the verge of seeing their premiums, co-pays and deductibles skyrocket,” Jeffries said.
Democrats will need the support of at least a handful of Republicans in order to get the 218 signatures needed to force a vote on the bill. The discharge petition was released mid-afternoon.
What’s in the new bill
The spending package wraps in several different bills and provisions, such as the three full-year funding bills that cover the Agriculture Department, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Legislative Branch, military construction projects and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Included are:
- A stopgap spending bill that will keep the rest of the federal government running through Jan. 30;
- $30 million for the U.S. Capitol Police to enhance protections for lawmakers, $30 million for the U.S. Marshals Service to bolster security for members of the judicial and executive branches, and $28 million for enhanced safety for Supreme Court justices;
- Language requiring the Trump administration to reinstate the thousands of workers it sent layoff notices to during the shutdown and preventing officials from firing those workers through January;
- Provisions mandating the Trump administration provide back pay to all federal workers, including those furloughed during the shutdown. Trump at one point during the shutdown had threatened to yank that back pay, though it is required by law.
The Trump administration issued a Statement of Administration Policy a few hours before the House voted, saying the administration strongly supports the bill, describing the measure as “a fiscally responsible package that provides the full-year funding necessary to support the Nation’s veterans, farmers, and rural communities.”
The package also “ends disruptions to programs the American people rely on and ensures the thousands of Federal employees who have been forced to work without a paycheck, such as air traffic controllers, will be promptly paid,” the administration added.
The Agriculture and Military Construction-VA spending bills include tens of billions of dollars in earmarks requested by lawmakers from both political parties, important to them as midterm elections loom in 2026.
‘Legislative self-dealing’ in Senate attacked
But not every Republican on Capitol Hill is happy with how the full-year bills turned out.
Speaker Johnson announced mid-afternoon that the House would take a separate vote later this month to remove language from the package that will allow senators to file suit against the federal government if their data is subpoenaed.
“We are putting this legislation on the fast track suspension calendar in the House for next week,” Johnson wrote in a social media post.
The provision, tucked into the full-year Legislative Branch spending bill, is retroactive to January 1, 2022, and would apply to the eight senators who had their cell phone records subpoenaed during a 2023 investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The FBI reportedly obtained data for cell phone use between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021, for Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, as well as Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin said during floor debate the bill “contains the single most corrupt provision for legislative self-dealing that anyone in this chamber today has ever voted on.”
“This provision is an affront to our taxpayers, to the rule of law, to everyone who believes that we in public office must be the servants of the people, not the masters of the people who get special legal rights and privileges and multi-million-dollar payoffs,” Raskin said.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters earlier in the day that he will “definitely” be filing a lawsuit after the new provision becomes law.
“And if you think I’m going to settle this thing for a million dollars? No. I want to make it so painful no one ever does this again,” Graham said, later adding he wasn’t sure if he’d win such a case.
Dissatisfaction among GOP lawmakers with that provision was on full display on social media, where Florida’s Steube responded to Speaker Johnson’s post by writing that the “Senate will never take up your ‘standalone’ bill. This is precisely why you shouldn’t let the Senate jam the House.”