House takes key step forward on funding package to reopen the federal government

By Sarah Ferris, Ellis Kim, CNN

(CNN) — The House has cleared a key procedural hurdle to set up a final vote on the Senate-passed funding package to reopen the federal government.

Lawmakers voted 213 to 209 to advance the bill Wednesday, the 43rd day of a historic government shutdown. Nearly all Republicans voted to advance the deal that was struck by centrist Senate Democrats and the GOP in recent days.

Back in Washington for the first time since September, the House will now take a final vote on the measure.

The package sets up a new funding cliff in Congress on January 30, but some critical programs ensnared in the recent shutdown will be immune from future political fights as the bill provides funding for a few key agencies through the remainder of fiscal year 2026.

The SNAP and WIC programs, which deliver food and nutrition services to tens of millions of Americans, as well as veterans services, would continue to be funded if the government were to shut down again over the next few months.

In the end, most Democrats in Congress loudly protested the bill, which offers zero guarantee that Washington will act to extend expiring enhanced health care subsidies that help Americans pay down their premiums.

Speaker Mike Johnson is seeking to corral his fractious conference behind the bill, despite sharp complaints from some of his members over a contentious provision added by Senate Republicans that allowed senators to retroactively sue the Department of Justice for obtaining phone records during a Biden-era probe – potentially amounting to a major financial windfall for those lawmakers.

Johnson himself said he was blindsided by the language, and he said he didn’t know about it until the Senate had already passed the package.

“I was shocked by it, I was angry about it,” the speaker said, though he added that he did not believe Senate Majority Leader John Thune added it in a nefarious manner. “I think it was a really bad look, and we’re going to fix it in the House.”

In an attempt to secure the votes of those conservative holdouts, Johnson has vowed that the House would take a future vote to strip that language – though it’s unclear if the Senate would take it up.

Conservatives like Rep. Chip Roy of Texas had blasted that provision as “self-dealing,” since it would award senators $500,000 or more in damages for each violation by the government if their lawsuit is successful. The amendment appeared to benefit eight senators in particular who had been subpoenaed by the previous administration into investigations into Trump’s first term.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations panel, accused those eight senators of voting “to shove taxpayer dollars into their own pockets – $500,000 for each time their records were inspected.”

The end of the government shutdown will usher in a frenetic few weeks of work for the House, which has been largely shuttered since late September. As part of the GOP’s pressure campaign on Democrats, Johnson had decided to keep all members out of Washington until Senate Democrats agreed to back the GOP’s existing funding plan.

But once Johnson muscles through the funding package, he faces another looming crisis: the question of how Congress should handle the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Not long before the votes to reopen the government got underway, a newly elected Democrat — Rep. Adelita Grijalva — became the critical 218th signature to force a vote to compel the Justice Department to release all of its case files related to Epstein. Her signature — under a parliamentary tool known as a discharge petition — now forces House GOP leaders to schedule a vote on the House floor.

The Epstein pressure continues to grow in the House GOP. Earlier Wednesday, House Democrats on the Oversight panel released new emails that showed Epstein had repeatedly mentioned Trump by name in private correspondence, and then the GOP-led committee released 200,000 pages of documents the panel received from Epstein’s estate.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.