Spending Deal Is Dead. It's Not Clear What's Next

The bipartisan spending bill Congress put forward to prevent a government shutdown is dead, according to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who responded "yes" when asked Wednesday night if the deal had been officially scrapped following President-elect Trump's rejection of it. House Speaker Mike Johnson has not yet said how he plans to proceed, the BBC reports. Rather than passing a budget for the fiscal year that started October 1, Congress passed a temporary spending bill, which expires Friday. Without a short-term funding bill passing, a federal government shutdown looms.

• "There's still a lot of negotiations and conversations going on," and no clear path forward yet, Scalise told reporters, per the New York Post, which refers to the rejected bipartisan stopgap bill as "bloated" at 1,547 pages. Trump has called for it to be streamlined.
• Elon Musk, who had also spoken out aggressively against the bill, posted victoriously after news broke that it had been killed. "Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed."
• Trump and VP-elect Vance are also calling for the national debt ceiling to be raised; asked whether that's on the table for the revised stopgap measure, Scalise would only say, "We're obviously looking at a lot of options."
• The Hill reports lawmakers on both sides seemed to be "caught off guard" by the debt limit increase demand. Politico reports it's a "complicated issue lawmakers hadn't planned to deal with for months," and there's quite a bit of concern that it can't be dealt with in a matter of days.

• Before the deal's collapse, Johnson went on Fox and Friends to talk about it Wednesday morning, and revealed that he's on a group text with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and that he'd been texting with them about the background of the deal the night prior, NBC News reports.
• He said he reminded them that with the thin margin Republicans have in the House, Democrat votes are needed, but apparently they (and Trump, and Vance) were unconvinced; as the Washington Post explains, critics of the bill claim it contains too many "giveaways to Democrats."
• Sources tell Politico and the Hill Johnson is now considering a "clean" continuing resolution as a Plan B, meaning additional provisions such as disaster aid and financial assistance for farmers would be dropped from the spending bill and considered again in the new year. It's unclear Democrats, or even all of the House's conservative lawmakers, would support such a move.

(More spending bill stories.)