House approves final funding bills, sending package to Senate as government shutdown deadline nears

Washington — The House approved the final legislation needed to fund the government through September on Thursday, sending a package of bills to the Senate as lawmakers face a deadline to avoid a partial shutdown next week.

In a 341 to 88 vote, 149 Democrats and 192 Republicans voted in favor of a three-bill package related to the departments of Defense; Labor, Health and Human Services and Education; and Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. The chamber also voted 220 to 207 to approve a separate measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

The funding bills now head to the Senate for approval. They are expected to be packaged together with two other measures that passed in the lower chamber last week. That should speed up passage in the Senate, but the chamber will still have to work quickly, with just days to go before a Jan. 30 deadline. A brewing winter storm is also threatening to upend senators' plans to return to Washington early next week.

After weeks of working to craft individual funding bills following the longest shutdown in history last year, House and Senate appropriators released the text of the final four pieces of legislation earlier this week. GOP leaders faced hurdles heading into Thursday, with multiple factions looking to use leverage to extract concessions in the final funding fight until September. A procedural vote was on the brink of failing before leaders wrangled the votes needed to move forward.

The DHS appropriations bill was taken up separately after many Democrats said they would not support it because it did not include extensive reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following the deadly shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. 

Top Democratic appropriators acknowledged that the DHS funding didn't go as far as some in their party had hoped. But they pointed to several concessions they secured, including new restrictions on DHS' ability to allocate funds if it does not comply with reporting requirements, new training benchmarks for officers and $20 million for body cameras for immigration enforcement agents.

Democratic leaders said they would oppose it anyway. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said at a news conference that "ICE is totally out of control, using taxpayer dollars to brutalize American citizens and law-abiding immigrant families."

"The American people deserve an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that conducts itself in a manner consistent with every other law enforcement agency in the country," Jeffries said.

The measure ultimately picked up enough support for passage, with moderate Democrats crossing the aisle.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, urged lawmakers to "listen to the common-sense reasonable Democrats who helped to put these bills together."

The speaker touted the funding bills more broadly, saying they would "fund the Trump agenda and Republican efforts to restore peace through strength, to defend our borders and to deport criminal illegal aliens, to rebuild America's infrastructure and to make America healthy again."

Republican leaders have pushed for a return to regular order in the appropriations process, pursuing the passage of all 12 funding bills rather than last-minute "omnibus" packages that have become commonplace in recent years. Johnson celebrated the appropriations work on Wednesday, saying there were many people who claimed "that this could not be done, that a regular appropriations process is a thing of the past."

"Critics said our margins were too slim to bring it back, to rebuild that muscle memory that I committed to when I became speaker," Johnson said. "They said we had too many bills left to pass and too many disagreements left to reconcile. But I'm happy to report that all of those prognostications were flat wrong, and we've gotten it done."

In a surprise move on Thursday, the House also approved an amendment that would repeal a controversial provision that allows senators to sue for $500,000 if federal investigators search their phone records without their knowledge. The move effectively jams the upper chamber by including the repeal in the funding package without the necessary time to reverse course, giving the Senate no option but to approve it.