The clock on the longest government shutdown in U.S. history had been ticking for 42 days, 23 hours and 24 minutes when President Donald Trump signed the bill ending it. It was the latest step in a slow-motion death that had dragged on for days since Sunday, when Senate Republicans secured enough votes to reopen the spigot of public money, which had been partially turned off since Oct. 1.
The bill had been approved a couple of hours earlier by the House of Representatives, whose members met in session for the first time since September 19 to vote on the government funding proposal, which passed the Senate on Monday after seven Democrats and one independent crossed over to the Republican side.
The House voted 222 (216 Republicans and six Democrats) and 209 to 209 (202 Democrats and seven Republicans) on Wednesday. With that formality out of the way, all that remained was Trump’s signature to end the shutdown, a recurring threat that materializes when the two parties can’t agree on budget issues.
Trump signed the financing proposal in the Oval Office, valid only until January 30th. He was joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson and other members of Congress. The president has not missed an opportunity to repeat some of the lies he has repeated during the prolonged government shutdown. He also took the opportunity to lash out at his rivals and urge his allies in the Senate to end the filibuster rule, which requires a 60-100 majority to pass most legislative initiatives.
Then he did not answer the journalists’ questions, who shouted them anyway. This is the topic of the day: the presence of Trump’s name in a new set of documents involving billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
With the president’s signature, the situation will gradually return to normal in dozens of closed or neglected federal agencies, museums, monuments and national parks, as well as major US airports, which have suffered thousands of flight cancellations and tens of thousands of delays due to the effects of the lockdown on air traffic controllers and security workers, officials considered “essential” and therefore forced to work without pay. Other federal workers, about 750,000, have been suspended from work without pay for more than six weeks.
It is not clear when all these problems will be solved, especially the one affecting airports. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which last week launched a plan to prevent air traffic congestion, suspended it Wednesday evening.
It is also unclear to what extent the 42 million food stamp program (SNAP) recipients will be affected. The Trump administration has tried in every way to avoid paying the sums owed for November, and last Friday the Supreme Court sided with the White House.
The agreement includes provisions for federal government funding until the end of January, when a new crisis could occur; food stamp funding during fiscal year 2026; and the Trump administration’s commitment to reinstate employees fired during these 43 days. It also includes retroactively refunding salaries to those who kept their jobs and not laying off any more federal employees for the next two and a half months.
Almost more important is what the pact does not provide. This is especially true for Democrats, who are once again facing a domestic crisis just a week after their resounding election victories in New York, Virginia and New Jersey. Republicans are not committed to extending some of the health coverage provided by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), named after the president who enacted it. These subsidies were passed during the Covid pandemic, and their likely end will cause health insurance costs to skyrocket for 24 million Americans. Republicans have agreed to hold a vote on these subsidies soon, although the initiative does not appear likely to pass Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson held the House on recess for 54 days in an unprecedented attempt to blame Democrats for the effects of the government shutdown. The last thing the representatives did before going into indefinite recess was to approve the budget plan, which then failed to secure the necessary support in the Senate: an absolute majority of 60 votes that was only achieved on Sunday, after 14 failed attempts. Democrats then refused to support the plan that would have allowed the government, in office since October 1, to remain open.
During that time, Johnson also refused – and there is every indication that it was due to a political calculation based on his unswerving loyalty to Trump – to allow Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva (Ariz.) to be sworn in after winning a special election on September 22 to succeed her father, Raúl Grijalva, who died in January.
Grijalva’s vote
On Wednesday afternoon Grijalva finally succeeded. The first thing he did was sign a petition with his supporters to force a vote in Congress. If it passes, which is unlikely, it would force the White House to release all files held by the Justice Department related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. Johnson has scheduled the vote for next week.
The Democrats and a handful of Republicans who give them the necessary 218 votes (Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace) want to know the contents of those documents that the Justice Department had promised to release for months, until last July, when Attorney General Pam Bondi released a statement, signed by FBI Director Kash Patel, changing their minds.
New emails from Epstein, released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, reveal that he repeatedly mentions Trump. The two were friends for 15 years, until they broke up in 2004. This was before Epstein’s first trial and before the real estate mogul and reality TV star became president.
The White House’s sudden refusal to make these files public has fueled suspicions that they contain something Trump doesn’t want revealed. This triggered Trump’s most serious crisis with his MAGA supporters earlier in the summer. Conspiracy theorists have long suspected that these files contain a list of rich and famous individuals implicated in Epstein’s crimes, a list that is kept to protect them. They also suspect that the financier did not take his own life in prison while awaiting trial, as the medical examiner’s report concludes.
Until the Trump administration releases all the material, if it ever does, Congress will have obtained batches of documents from Epstein’s estate since August. The most recently released emails are from the latest batch. Bondi has the complete dossier on his desk, according to his own statements.
Trump claims he knew nothing of his old friend’s crimes. On Wednesday, I dismissed the new revelations as yet another example of a Democratic tactic to distract from the end of the government shutdown. “Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein hoax again because they will do anything to deflect from how much harm they did on Shutdown and so many other topics,” he wrote on his platform, Truth Social.
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