Lawmakers in Washington prepare for a possible government shutdown this weekend, and Democratic-leaning activist groups prepare to fight Project 2025.

House rejects Trump-backed plan on government shutdown, leaving next steps uncertain

The House rejected President-elect Donald Trump's new plan Thursday to fund federal operations and suspend the debt ceiling a day before a government shutdown, as Democrats refused to accommodate his sudden demands and the quick fix cobbled together by Republican leaders.

In a hastily convened evening vote punctuated by angry outbursts over the self-made crisis, the lawmakers failed to reach the two-thirds threshold needed for passage — but House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared determined to try again before Friday's midnight deadline.

“We're going to do the right thing here,” Johnson said ahead of the vote. But he didn't even get a majority, with the bill failing 174-235.

The outcome proved a massive setback for Trump and his billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who rampaged against Johnson's bipartisan compromise, which Republicans and Democrats had reached earlier to prevent a Christmastime government shutdown.

It provides an preview of the turbulence ahead when Trump returns to the White House with Republican control of the House and Senate. During his first term, Trump led Republicans into the longest government shutdown in history during the 2018 Christmas season, and interrupted the holidays in 2020 by tanking a bipartisan COVID-relief bill and forcing a do-over.

Hours earlier, Trump announced “SUCCESS in Washington!” in coming up with the new package which would keep government running for three more months, add $100.4 billion in disaster assistance including for hurricane-hit states, and allow more borrowing through Jan. 30, 2027.

"Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good Deal,” Trump posted.

But Republicans, who had spent 24 hours largely negotiating with themselves to come up with the new plan, ran into a wall of resistance from Democrats, who were were in no hurry to appease demands from Trump — or his billionaire ally Musk.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats were sticking with the original deal with Johnson and called the new one “laughable.”

“It's not a serious proposal,” Jeffries said as he walked to Democrats' own closed-door caucus meeting. Inside, Democrats were chanting, “Hell, no!”

All day, Johnson had been fighting to figure out how to meet Trump's sudden demands — and keep his own job — while federal offices are being told to prepare to shutter operations.

The new proposal whittled the 1,500-page bill to 116 pages and drops a number of add-ons — notably the first pay raise for lawmakers in more than a decade, which could have allowed as much as a 3.8% bump. That drew particular scorn as Musk turned his social media army against the bill.

Trump said early Thursday that Johnson will “easily remain speaker” for the next Congress if he “acts decisively and tough” in coming up with a new plan to also increase the debt limit, a stunning request just before the Christmas holidays that has put the beleaguered speaker in a bind.

And if not, the president-elect warned of trouble ahead for Johnson and Republicans in Congress.

“Anybody that supports a bill that doesn’t take care of the Democrat quicksand known as the debt ceiling should be primaried and disposed of as quickly as possible,” Trump told Fox News Digital.

Left-leaning legal groups organize to fight Project 2025 as Trump continues to distance himself from it

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, Skye Perryman is preparing legal challenges to a lot of what he wants to do.

“It will be a really major effort and it’s going to be very hard,” she told Spectrum News in an interview in her Washington, D.C. office.

Perryman heads the left-leaning advocacy group Democracy Forward. She’s helped assemble what’s called Democracy 2025, a coalition of more than 800 lawyers and advocates, and nearly 300 organizations, that will use lawsuits to fight Trump’s policy priorities and the conservative blueprint outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

“We do believe that this is going to be a time where the courts are going to play, and going to have to play, a really essential role,” Perryman said.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly tied Trump to Project 2025, and he consistently denied any connection to it.

“And we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers,” Harris said during her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in August.

At their one debate the following month, Trump distanced himself from the project.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there, I haven’t read it, I don’t want to read it, purposely,” he said.

In a statement to Spectrum News, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said: "President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025. This has always been a lie pushed by the Democrats and the legacy media, but clearly the American people did not buy it because they overwhelmingly voted for President Trump to implement the promises that he made on the campaign trail.”

She added, “All of President Trump's cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump's agenda, not the agenda of outside groups."