How a routine spending bill turned Washington upside down

Trump told Johnson he was concerned that the spending bill would be loaded up with pet projects to win votes. And he said he wanted to take care of a problem that would confront him in his new term: the debt ceiling. The goal, according to people familiar with the gathering at Trump’s Florida estate, was to provide a glide path as the incoming president prepared for a triumphant return to Washington in 2025.

This week it all unraveled.

Trump narrowly avoided a government shutdown, and for the first time since the election, dozens of GOP lawmakers openly defied him. Johnson is facing a serious threat of losing Trump’s confidence—and the speakership. The near-euphoric mood surrounding Republicans was briefly replaced by finger-pointing and intraparty squabbling one month before Trump takes office.

The chaos might offer clues about what is to come. While Trump will preside over unified Republican control of Washington, his narrow majorities in the House and Senate mean he will have to keep fractious lawmakers together. Social-media missives and primary threats might not be enough to persuade the most stubborn members of the Republican caucus.

“We shouldn’t be in this mess," said Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.). “We’re better than this, and we need to do better than this."

On Friday night, hours before the government was set to shut down, House lawmakers passed a slimmed-down bill to fund federal agencies for three months, provide disaster relief, and deliver economic aid for farmers. The bill doesn’t address the debt ceiling, and GOP lawmakers said they would vote on the issue next year. The bill now heads to the Democratic-controlled Senate. It wasn’t immediately known how quickly the Senate would act.

Even though Washington averted a shutdown, lawmakers are still struggling with an unprecedented wild card: the influence of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump sidekicks who are embarking on an ambitious project to slash the size of government.

It was Musk, not Trump, who led the attacks on the 1,547 page stopgap bill Johnson unveiled Tuesday evening. “This bill should not pass," the world’s richest person tweeted at 4:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Hours later, Trump demanded a streamlined version of the package, coupled with an immediate boost of the federal debt limit.

Democrats including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) sought to exploit the dynamic, painting “oligarch" Musk as the one pulling the strings. Others referred to Musk as the new president. Several Republican lawmakers called for Musk to be the next House speaker. It couldn’t be determined how much Trump and Musk coordinated in advance of the billionaire Tesla chief executive’s move to go public with his opposition to the legislation, though aides noted that they speak every day and Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago.

For now, Trump and Musk’s close relationship remains intact, but some of the president’s allies predict that tumult lies ahead.

Tweets, text chains and tension

There were few signs of discord when Johnson and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) attended the Army-Navy game with Trump and Musk on Dec. 14. Attendees in the private box with the lawmakers said Trump and Musk didn’t voice major concerns about the pending spending package.

Four days later, Musk’s early-morning X posts blew everything up.

The speaker and his three other negotiating partners spent the final weeks of the least-productive Congress in modern history hammering out the spending deal, which would have punted the government funding deadline for three months and helped states hit by hurricanes. But it was the dozens of less-prominent line items—from pandemic-response provisions to a pay raise for lawmakers—that drew the ire of Musk, Ramaswamy and conservative lawmakers.

The bill contained so many giveaways that it was hard for Republicans to pinpoint the one they hated most. Republican lawmakers contacted Musk and Ramaswamy to voice their own concerns about the original bill’s spending proposals, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump’s advisers privately griped that Johnson hadn’t adequately filled them in on the full scope of what would be in the package.

On a group-text chain, Johnson tried to explain the bill to Ramaswamy and Musk on Tuesday and Wednesday. But his messages did little to assuage their concerns. Musk subsequently posted on X roughly 100 times about the bill, riling followers, who called congressional offices.

For hours, lawmakers waited for Trump to say something, wondering if Musk and Ramaswamy’s angry social-media rants reflected the president-elect’s position.

It wasn’t until 4:28 p.m. on Wednesday, more than 12 hours after Musk launched his social-media assault on the package, that they got clarity. Trump signaled his opposition to the bill in a joint statement released by Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, first posted on Vance’s X feed. But he also went public for the first time with a demand to increase the debt ceiling as part of the spending deal.

Johnson never brought up the debt ceiling during weeks of Capitol Hill negotiations on the spending package, people familiar with the negotiations said. Trump aides said the president-elect’s feelings on the matter and his insistence that it be dealt with shouldn’t have been a surprise.

As the chaos on Capitol Hill was unfolding, the president-elect and Musk were at Mar-a-Lago, dining with the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, the latest in a line of billionaires trekking to the Florida estate. The next morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that everyone wants to be his friend.

Meanwhile, stunned senior Republicans shuttled in and out of Johnson’s office for hours, unable to explain what was happening. By Thursday, they were still looking for a path forward.

“I do not know, I do not know, I really don’t," said Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.), who chairs the appropriations committee, as he left Johnson’s office around 1:15 p.m. that day. “I know the sun came up this morning, it’ll go down tonight, and I’ll betcha it comes up tomorrow morning as well."

A reporter asked if a debt ceiling was on the table as Cole escaped into a nearby conference room. “I don’t know!" Cole repeated, as the door closed behind him.

About 2½ hours later, Cole emerged from Johnson’s office and told reporters a deal had been reached. As House lawmakers debated a revised agreement that would have punted the government funding deadline by three months and suspended the nation’s borrowing limit for two years, Democrats jeered. The presiding Republican, Rep. Marc Molinaro of New York, broke the gavel when he slammed it down hard to silence them.

By 7 p.m., that deal, too, was dead—with nearly all Democrats and 38 Republicans bucking Trump to vote no.

‘Not just the Democrats’

The demand to raise the debt ceiling was an early test of fealty to Trump. The president-elect asked his party to do something many of them fundamentally oppose. Debt-ceiling increases typically need Democratic votes because Republicans hate that they signal increased government spending to come.

“You never have any ounce of self-respect to go out and campaign, saying you’re going to balance the budget and then you come in here and pass $110 billion unpaid for," Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas) told his Republican colleagues who backed the Trump-endorsed bill. “It’s embarrassing, it’s shameful." In the run-up to the vote, Trump called for a primary challenge against Roy. Roy voted against it anyway.

Throughout the strained negotiations, some of Trump’s allies are starting to turn on Johnson—as the president-elect and his advisers vent their anger at the Republican lawmakers who earlier in the week opposed a revised spending deal Trump endorsed.

Shortly after the Trump-backed spending bill failed Thursday night, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon took the stage at a rally of the president’s supporters in Phoenix. He called for ousting Johnson for negotiating “1,500 pages of sellout’’ with Democrats on the bill.

Donald Trump Jr., one of the president-elect’s sons, was more blunt when he took the stage. “It’s not just the Democrats that are our foes. It’s a vast majority of the Republicans,’’ he said, referring to House GOP members who voted against the Trump-backed spending measure.

He later added: “For those people who aren’t willing to get in line and do their job, which is to serve their constituents, we have to start primarying the hell out of these people."

On Friday, as House lawmakers began voting on the latest revised legislation to keep the government open, Musk weighed in. “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances," he wrote on X. “It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces."

Lawmakers voted 366-34 to pass the legislation.

After the vote, Johnson said he has been in “constant contact" with Trump. He also said he spoke to Musk and among other things the two discussed the “extraordinary challenges" of the speaker’s job.

Katy Stech Ferek, Aaron Zitner and Vivian Salama contributed to this article.

Write to Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com, Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com, Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com and Lindsay Wise at lindsay.wise@wsj.com