Government shutdown live updates: Trump-backed second spending bill fails as Mike Johnson races to satisfy Congress

You are living in one of the finest private addresses in DC – the only Lutyens built house in North America – with its fabulous art collection, swimming pool, tennis court and hot and cold running servants; with your chauffeur driven Bentley, manicured gardens – and you’re right next door to the vice president’s official residence on Massachusetts Avenue. Trading that for your semi in Balham, or wherever your civil service salary has allowed you to buy, is quite the readjustment.

And our embassy in DC has just been totally refurbished at a cost of tens of millions of pounds. Yes, there can still be a bit of a sewery smell on the lower ground floor, and the fireplace in the drawing room when lit invariably smokes out the whole house so that guests have to retreat to the terrace. But these are small details.

A partial government shutdown is looming over the United States right before the holidays due to disagreements over a spending bill in Congress and lawmakers have until Friday night to figure it out.

If a spending bill finally does pass, federal agencies would be funded until mid-March.

But if it reaches midnight and there is still no deal, some federal services will be temporarily sidelined or federal workers will go unpaid.

Here’s Ariana Baio on how a government shutdown could impact Americans’ holiday plans.

Republican Lisa Murkowski has been speaking just now to The Independent’s Eric Garcia on the chaos in Congress and tells him she has four flights home for Christmas booked and has already had to cancel one.

“I’m reading whatever you guys are writing,” she said of the struggle to stay abreast of developments.

On Elon Musk’s influence over the incoming Trump administration, Murkowski said: “I guess that’s the power of an influencer. I mean, you know, you would think that there’s value in your election certificate, that we’re back here to do the work – and we will do the work.

“But this is obviously a level of influence that we saw the impact of yesterday.”

Her Kentucky counterpart Rand Paul tells The Indy that he thinks Chuck Schumer will pass a spending bill to keep the government open and then kick it to the House.

“I think Schumer eventually will pass something here, and that it’ll go over there and it’ll pass over there,” he said.

Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester was more blunt, telling us: “Look, the House has taken orders from the unelected false president Elon Musk.

“That’s the kind of s*** you run into when you start listening to people who aren’t elected.

“They need to get their heads out of the back end of whoever they got it up and get the job done.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders adds: “You have Elon Musk, an unelected official telling Republicans what they have to do and threatening to primary them if they don’t obey his wishes, you’re really seeing the power of oligarchy and the power of big money.”

The incoming president and his acolytes are promising retribution for critical journalists, writes Alan Rusbridger.

It is already having a chilling impact – and poses grave threats to the future of the free press.

Fresh from spoiling Christmas for America’s congressmen and women, the Big Tech mogul has described the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the country’s “saviour”, sparking calls from Berlin for him to “stay out” of its politics.

Honestly, couldn’t he just take up tennis or something?

Here’s Tom Watling’s report.

Donald Trump has transferred all 114.75m of his shares in the parent company that runs his Truth Social platform into a revocable trust before he returns to the White House.

His shares in Trump Media & Technology Group are currently worth roughly $4bn, representing the lion’s share of his roughly $6bn net worth. He is the group’s largest shareholder.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show the president-elect transferring the stake into the Donald J Trump Revocable Trust earlier this week.

His oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, is the sole trustee and has sole voting and investment power over securities held by the trust, according to the filings.

Trump remains the “sole beneficiary” of the trust.

Speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju just now, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had this to say about the state of play:

“Extreme MAGA Republicans are marching America to a painful government shutdown that will crash the economy and hurt working-class Americans because they would rather enact massive tax cuts for their billionaire donors than fund cancer research.”

His counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is meanwhile urging Speaker Johnson to revert to the original bipartisan stop-gap funding deal he had agreed to before Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s intervention.

“If Republicans do not work with Democrats in a bipartisan way very soon, the government will shut down at midnight. It’s time to go back to the original agreement we had just a few days ago. It’s time the House votes on our bipartisan CR,” Schumer said.

“It’s the quickest, simplest and easiest way we can make sure the government stays open while delivering critical emergency aid to the American people. If the House put our original agreement on the floor today, it would pass and we could put the threat of a shutdown behind us.

“Our agreement would keep the government open, provide emergency aid for communities battered by hurricanes and other natural disasters, support our seniors, support our doctors, nurses, rural hospitals, and protect our farmers from the dairy cliff. As I said, the only, only way to get anything done is through bipartisanship.”

But the White House Office of Management and Budget, for one, appears to have given up all hope…

This is what White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had to say in response to last night’s events:

“Republicans are doing the bidding of their billionaire benefactors at the expense of hardworking Americans.

“Republicans are breaking their word to support a bipartisan agreement that would lower prescription drug costs and make it harder to offshore jobs to China – and instead putting forward a bill that paves the way for tax breaks for billionaires while cutting critical programs working families count on, from Social Security to Head Start.

“President Biden supports the bipartisan agreement to keep the government open, help communities recovering from disasters, and lower costs – not this giveaway for billionaires that Republicans are proposing at the 11th hour.”