The longest government shutdown in American history is over. The House of Representatives passed the funding package by 222 votes to 209 on Wednesday evening, November 12, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in the Oval Office at about 9:45 p.m. Eastern time, less than two hours after the vote, according to the Associated Press.
The shutdown began on October 1, the first day of the federal fiscal year, when Congress had not passed funding for the new fiscal year. It ran for 43 days by the count used by the news wires — passing the previous record of 35 days set by the funding lapse of December 2018 to January 2019, also during Mr Trump's presidency. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers went without pay, food assistance for millions of families was thrown into doubt, and thousands of flights were cancelled or delayed as air traffic controllers and transport security officers worked unpaid.
How the House vote went
The vote was mostly along party lines. Two Republicans voted against the bill — Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Greg Steube of Florida — and six Democrats voted for it: 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, according to States Newsroom. It was the first time the House had taken up legislation since mid-September, when Republican leaders sent members home after passing a stopgap measure they knew could not advance in the Senate.
Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the Appropriations Committee, urged support during the debate, telling colleagues that 'history reminds us that shutdowns never change the outcome.' He added, according to States Newsroom: 'Over the last 43 days the facts did not shift, the votes required did not shift, the path forward did not change. The only thing that did move was the level of pain Democrats inflicted on the nation.'
Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the spending panel, rejected the bill and said it did 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,' she said, according to States Newsroom. 'And this bill leaves families without even a glimmer of hope that their costs might go down.'
Flanked by Republican lawmakers around the Resolute Desk, Mr Trump used the signing ceremony to blame Democrats for the standoff and to warn voters to remember it. 'So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this,' he said, according to the Associated Press. 'When we come up to midterms and other things, don't forget what they've done to our country.' He also told those present that 'the country has never been in better shape' and described the shutdown as a 'short-term disaster' caused by Democrats who, in his words, thought it would help them politically.
What the 394-page package actually does
The legislation is a 394-page package that the Senate substantially reworked from the stopgap bill the House originally passed in mid-September, according to States Newsroom. Its core is a continuing resolution that funds most of the federal government at existing levels through January 30, giving Congress about eleven more weeks to complete the full-year spending bills for the fiscal year that began on October 1.
Attached to the stopgap are three full-year spending bills that fund their areas through September 30: the Agriculture Department, including the Food and Drug Administration; the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction; and the legislative branch, which is Congress itself. The Agriculture and military construction bills also contain tens of billions of dollars in earmarks requested by lawmakers from both parties, according to States Newsroom.
One provision matters to millions of households immediately. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the food assistance programme used by about 42 million lower-income Americans, is fully funded through the end of the fiscal year under the Agriculture bill, so benefits no longer depend on the next round of negotiations. It also includes $8.2 billion for WIC, the nutrition programme for women, infants and children, according to reporting on the package. That guarantee arrives in the same week that the Agriculture Department separately proposed a rule to tighten eligibility for the programme, a proposal that would remove about 6.3 million people from food stamps if finalised. The two developments are distinct: the funding bill secures the money, while the proposed rule would change who qualifies for it.
The package also reverses the Trump administration's firing of furloughed federal workers during the shutdown and bars further layoffs through January. It requires back pay for all federal workers, including those furloughed during the shutdown. Mr Trump had at one point during the standoff threatened to withhold that back pay, although it is required by law. The White House issued a statement of administration policy a few hours before the House vote, strongly supporting the bill and describing it as 'a fiscally responsible package that provides the full-year funding necessary to support the Nation's veterans, farmers, and rural communities.'
Security funding is also included. The package provides $30 million for the United States Capitol Police to enhance protections for lawmakers, $30 million for the United States Marshals Service to bolster security for members of the judicial and executive branches, and $28 million for enhanced safety for Supreme Court justices, according to States Newsroom. The Associated Press reported a larger overall security figure of $203.5 million for lawmakers' security, a difference that appears to reflect additional items counted in the wider total.
How the deadlock broke
The shutdown ended the way it had been heading since Sunday night, when the Senate first cracked the deadlock. After nearly six weeks of failed procedural votes, seven centrist Senate Democrats and one independent broke with their party's leaders on Sunday to advance a reworked spending package, and the same eight then voted to approve the legislation on Monday night by 60 votes to 40, the threshold needed to overcome a filibuster. The eight were Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, according to Vellum Daily and the Associated Press.
Most other Democrats voted no, including the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who argued the deal gave up too much. The negotiators said the country could not wait any longer, pointing to airport security lines, food assistance offices and unpaid workers in every state. The Senate vote on Monday night did not reopen anything by itself: until the House passed the same bill and the president signed it, federal workers remained unpaid, food aid stayed in limbo and the government stayed shut. Fourteen earlier procedural votes on the House-passed funding bill had gone nowhere.
The deal does not extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that help millions of people pay for health insurance — the demand Democrats made the condition of their support for six weeks. Those credits expire at the end of December. In exchange, Senate Majority Leader John Thune promised a Senate vote on extending them no later than the second week of December. That is a promise of a vote, not a result: the extension would still need 60 votes in the Senate and a path through the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson has made no commitment to hold a similar vote.
What happens next
Federal agencies were expected to begin reopening within hours, with furloughed workers returning to their jobs on Thursday and back pay to follow, according to the White House and congressional leaders. The Office of Management and Budget directed departments to resume normal operations immediately. The first test of the recovery will be practical: whether back pay reaches all furloughed and excepted employees promptly, and how quickly agencies that shed staff and cancelled services during the lapse can return to normal.
Air travel should also ease. The Federal Aviation Administration had ordered airlines to cut flights at 40 of the busiest airports as controllers worked without pay, and thousands of flights were cancelled or delayed during the shutdown. Those flight reductions and the backlog of cancelled flights should ease over the coming days, although full schedules may take longer to restore.
The politics will run on. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 50 percent of Americans blamed Republicans for the record-long shutdown, while 47 percent blamed Democrats, according to the Associated Press — a near-even split that underlines that neither party emerged with a decisive victory. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats will try to gather the signatures needed for a discharge petition to force a floor vote on legislation extending the tax credits for three years; they would need at least a handful of Republicans to reach the 218 signatures required.
Two more dates now frame the calendar. The promised Senate vote on the health-care subsidies comes no later than the second week of December, and the stopgap runs out on January 30 — which means Congress must still pass the nine remaining annual appropriations bills, and failure would mean another shutdown fight within eleven weeks. For Punjabi diaspora families and truckers across the United States, the reopening brings back the federal services the shutdown had disrupted — from air travel and food assistance to the agencies that process permits, benefits and paperwork — even as the health-care costs that caused the standoff remain unresolved.