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President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats struck a deal Thursday to avert a prolonged shutdown for most of the federal government, according to Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office.
The agreement would fund all of the government except for the Department of Homeland Security through September. DHS would operate on a two-week stopgap bill, according to five sources familiar with the agreement, in order to buy time to negotiate changes sought by Democrats following public outrage over the DHS killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
Senators had hoped to vote on the deal Thursday night but couldn’t resolve a handful of minor issues; the chamber will now aim to vote on Friday. The House, which returns to Washington on Monday, would then need to pass the legislation and send it to Trump’s desk for his signature.
Funding will temporarily lapse for multiple agencies starting at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, but if the deal passes both chambers, the impact is expected to be minimal, since most federal employees don’t work on the weekend.
Trump urged lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to vote for the bipartisan deal.
“The only thing that can slow our Country down is another long and damaging Government Shutdown,” he said Thursday night on Truth Social.
“Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come together to get the vast majority of the Government funded until September, while at the same time providing an extension to the Department of Homeland Security,” he said. “Hopefully, both Republicans and Democrats will give a very much needed Bipartisan ‘YES’ Vote.”
The deal reflects what senators in both parties floated just a day earlier: a short-term funding bill for DHS while the two parties negotiate changes to the department and ICE, which it oversees, along with bills to fund the rest of the government.
The two sides agreed to a two-week continuing resolution that would keep DHS running through Feb. 13, just before both chambers depart for a weeklong recess, the sources told NBC News.
“If Republicans don’t do s— for two weeks, DHS shuts down and there’s little incentive for us to reopen without the guardrails on ICE,” a Democratic aide said.
The agreement came together just hours after the Senate rejected a sweeping $1.2 trillion funding package the House passed last week; that legislation bundled all six funding bills together, including funding for DHS. The Senate vote was 45-55, with eight Republicans joining all Democrats in voting no — far short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster.
The failed vote on the House package was expected, as Democrats had warned they wouldn’t support it without significant safeguards related to DHS and ICE operations. But the degree of GOP opposition to the existing package highlighted the leverage Democrats had in securing an agreement.
“This is a moment of truth for the United States of America. What the nation witnessed on Saturday in the streets of Minneapolis was a moral abomination,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said before the deal was revealed. “What ICE is doing, outside the law, is state-sanctioned thuggery, and it must stop. … And Congress has the authority and the moral obligation to act.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., meanwhile, deferred to the White House to cut a deal, telling reporters: “My hope and expectation is that, yeah, as the White House and Senate Dems, they work this out, that they’ll be able to produce the votes that are necessary to get it passed.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said there were extensive discussions Wednesday ahead of the deal’s being clinched.
“I was with the president for about three hours yesterday in the Oval Office, and we were on the phone with Chuck Schumer and Leader Thune and Tom Homan,” Trump’s border czar, Johnson said at the premiere of the “Melania” documentary at the Kennedy Center. “There was a lot of discussion there. I thought it was productive. And I certainly hope that the shutdown could be avoided. We’ll see.”
Funding for many critical agencies — including the departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Education and Homeland Security — runs out at 11:59 p.m. ET Friday.
Those agencies are expected to shut down regardless of the bipartisan deal, since anything the Senate passes will also need to be passed by the House.
Earlier Thursday, at his first Cabinet meeting of the new year, Trump said: “We’ll work in a very bipartisan way, I believe, not to have a shutdown. We don’t want to shut down.”
