In a development that ended the longest government shutdown in US history, the President on Wednesday signed into law a bill to immediately reopen federal agencies.
The move came just hours after the House of Representatives approved a package that restores coverage for food benefits, allows hundreds of thousands of federal employees to receive their paychecks and breathes life into an already overburdened air traffic system.
With a narrow majority of 222–209, Republicans managed to pass the deal in the House, relying on Trump’s public support to contain the backlash within the party. At the same time, Democrats were visibly incensed as the months-long impasse that began in the Senate ultimately failed to secure the much-coveted expansion of health care subsidies.
Specifically, the bill, which earlier in the week would allow federal employees furloughed by the 43-day shutdown to return to work as early as Thursday, though it remains unclear how quickly government services and operations will resume to their full extent.
“We can never allow something like this to happen again,” Trump said in the Oval Office during the signing ceremony, which he used to criticize Democrats. “This is no way to run a country.”
The deal extends funding through Jan. 30, leaving the federal government on track to add about $1.8 trillion to its debt total of $38 trillion.
“I feel like I’m in an episode of Seinfeld. We’re 40 days in and I still don’t know what the case was,” said Republican Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona, likening the way Congress handled the shutdown to the events of the popular 1990s American series.
“I really thought this would last 48 hours: everyone would take their side, have a chance to vent, and then we’d go back to work.” He added: “What happens now that anger becomes politics?”
In the “dark” investors and households
The end of the shutdown gives some hope that they will have time to recover, with the travel rush of the important Thanksgiving holiday just two weeks away. Reinstating food aid to millions of families could ease household budgets ahead of the Christmas holiday season.
It also means that the flow of data on the US economy from key statistical agencies will be restored within the next few days. The absence of data had left investors and households largely in the dark about the state of the labor market, the path of inflation and the pace of consumer spending and economic growth overall.
Some gaps in the data will likely be permanent, however, as the White House says the employment and CPI reports for October may never be released.
The cost to the US economy
By many economists’ estimates, the shutdown removed more than a tenth of a percentage point from GDP for each of the roughly six weeks the shutdown lasted, though most of that lost output is expected to be recovered in the coming months.
No promises about health care
The vote came eight days after a Democratic victory in , which many in the party saw as boosting their chances of securing an extension of health care subsidies, which expire at the end of the year.
Although the deal calls for a December Senate vote on those subsidies, House Speaker Mike Johnson has not made a corresponding commitment in the House.
Democratic Rep. Mikey Sherrill, who was elected last week to be New Jersey’s next governor, spoke out against the funding bill in her final speech before resigning from Congress, encouraging her colleagues to stand up to the Trump administration.
“To my colleagues: Don’t let this body become a ceremonial red stamp of a government that takes food from children and withholds care,” Sherrill said. “To the country: Stay strong. As we say in the Navy, don’t abandon ship.”
No winner since shutdown
Despite the recriminations, no party seems to have emerged as a clear winner. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday showed 50 percent of Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown, while 47 percent blame Democrats.
The vote came on the first day the Republican-controlled House has been in session since mid-September — a lengthy recess meant to increase pressure on Democrats. The House return also set in motion the countdown to a vote that would require the release of all declassified files that
On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson administered the oath of office to Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won a September special election for the Arizona seat held by her late father, Raul Grijalva. Her signature was the last needed to force a House vote on the issue, hours after Democrats released new documents about Epstein.
That means, after Congress has fulfilled its constitutional obligation to keep the government funded, the House could once again be absorbed in an investigation into Trump’s former friend, whose life and death in 2019 in prison have been the subject of countless conspiracy theories.
The funding package would also allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations related to the federal investigation into the January 6, 2021 attack on Capitol Hill by Trump supporters.
It retroactively makes it illegal in most cases to obtain a senator’s phone records without notice, and allows those whose records were collected to sue the Justice Department for $500,000 in damages.
