House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called the new stopgap funding bill, titled the American Relief Act, announced by Republicans on Thursday “laughable.”
Jeffries made the comments to CNN after GOP leadership emerged with a clean continuing resolution to fund the government for three months.
“The Trump-Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious — it’s laughable,” Jeffries told the outlet, referring to the president-elect, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Elon Musk, who was instrumental in sinking the first iteration of the stopgap on Wednesday. “Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”
Jeffries called a conference meeting for late Thursday afternoon to discuss the CR.
“I’m not just a no, I’m a hell no,” Jeffries said in the meeting, CNN reported.
He wasn't alone.
“The Senate Democrats, the Senate Republicans, the House Democrats, the House Republicans, everybody agreed, and then it was blown up by Elon Musk, who apparently has become the fourth branch of government, and that’s just an intolerable way of proceeding under representative democracy,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said, CNN reported. “So, the Democrats are going to try to figure out how we can salvage the public good out of the wreckage.”
According to multiple reports, the funding bill includes:
- A clean three-month extension;
- A two-year suspension of debt limit to January 2027;
- A farm bill extension — $110 billion disaster relief package, which includes $10 billion in aid for farmers
The new bill is 116 pages as opposed to the 1,500 pages of the first iteration, The Hill reported. Pharmacy benefit reforms were removed from the original deal, a bipartisan measure that added to the length and complexity of the first version, according to The Hill.
Also, the new funding bill stripped many of the new policy provisions that Trump torpedoed on Wednesday, including a pay raise for lawmakers and the E15 ethanol provision, according to reports.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., told CNN that Democrats would not vote for this version of the CR, calling it “madness.”
“No, I think we negotiated the deal in good faith,” Meeks told CNN when asked if Democrats should support the bill. “We negotiated. That should be the bill that goes over to the Senate.”
At issue for Republicans, including Musk and Trump, was that the first iteration of the funding bill included bloated new initiatives — including a pay raise for lawmakers — and didn’t address the debt ceiling.
If every Democrat votes against the bill, Johnson can only spare a few Republican defections.
One House conservative, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, called it a “bad deal” after details began to leak, The Hill reported. Trump on Thursday called for Roy to be primaried in 2026.