Republicans were stunned when Elon Musk, with Donald Trump's help, successfully torpedoed a stopgap government funding bill that House speaker Mike Johnson had brokered.
The tech billionaire flexed his new political muscle with a barrage of tweets opposing the deal, and the president-elect jumped into the fray with threats to find primary opponents for any Republicans who voted in favor of the continuing resolution, but then Trump complicated matters even further by insisting on lifting or eliminating the debt ceiling before he takes office next month, reported CNN.
“It’s all very strange,” said one GOP lawmaker. “This was completely avoidable.”
Trump and Johnson discussed the funding bill in a private box at last weekend's Army-Navy football game, and Trump told the speaker he wanted a full-year spending bill with the debt limit as part of the deal, and Johnson tried to placate him without promising to deliver those specific items.
“He wanted the decks cleared,” said one source with knowledge of the conversation, suggesting that Trump wanted to enter his second term with congressional spending battles already sorted out.
Trump and his allies had been planning to deal with the debt ceiling, which Republicans have used as leverage to extract spending cuts from Democrats, during negotiations on an omnibus spending bill next year, but the president-elect recently decided he'd rather start with a clean slate, and his allies at Mar-a-Lago reached out to Johnson and his team to let them know, according to the new reporting.
“Inserting the debt ceiling conversation certainly added a new element,” a Trump adviser said.
Trump believes that Republican majorities in both chambers, even as razor-thin as they are, will give them even more leverage to demand steeper spending cuts during negotiations next year.
“Mar-a-Lago has signaled a lot of questioning about letting a debt limit slide into next year,” said one source involved in the conversations. “Why are we letting something that will be a Dem leverage point remain in place for the next year?”
House GOP leaders believed the bill would pass as recently as Wednesday afternoon around 1 p.m., according to multiple sources, but a whip count made clear Johnson didn't have enough Republican support, and a GOP source said the situation was "collapsing" by 3 p.m. as lawmakers found some spending surprises in the bill, such as pay raises for themselves.
“We knew 92 percent of what this was going to be well before, but that last 8 percent was a doozy,” said Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA).