8 policies stripped from GOP bill after Trump, Musk rebellion

Legislation to keep the government from shutting down has gotten smaller - but it still hasn’t passed.

The original plan negotiated between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Democrats in both chambers ran more than 1,500 pages, while the legislation that the House voted down on Thursday was just over 100 pages and dropped some policies unrelated to government spending.

President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk celebrated the smaller bill, arguing it avoided the government waste they believed the bipartisan plan included, even though both measures were expected to cost the federal government roughly the same amount. Both measures would have kept the government operating until mid-March and sent about $110 billion in aid to victims of natural disasters and farmers. The revised bill would also have suspended the federal borrowing limit for two years.

“Clean & simple,” Musk said of the new bill on X, the social media network he owns, after he repeatedly threatened to back primary challenges against Republicans who supported the original legislation. “If Dems reject this & government shuts down, they deserve to lose bigtime in the midterms.”

The bill failed to get the two-thirds support it needed for procedural reasons, and House GOP leaders are still trying to put together a new alternative.

But Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, pointed out that the revised legislation wouldn’t really have saved taxpayers any money, despite the shorter page count. And dropping the bipartisan proposals outraged Democrats, who accused Republicans of abandoning important priorities both sides had agreed on just because Trump - and Musk - didn’t like them.

Here are eight policies included in the original bill that Johnson and GOP leaders left out of the revised proposal. It’s not clear what the ultimate fate of any legislation to prevent a government shutdown is yet.

A fix for stolen food stamp funds

One provision taken out of the initial bill was aimed at ensuring that states replenish food stamp funds for Americans who rely on the program whose benefits are stolen.

Starting in 2023, the federal government has reimbursed states that provide benefits to the victims of food stamp theft. That measure is set to expire on Friday. Since the reimbursement began, states have reported paying $150 million in benefits to more than 300,000 households, according to Dottie Rosenbaum, an expert in the program at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a center-left think tank.

Pharmacy benefit overhaul

The original bill called for a series of changes to the operations of pharmacy benefit managers - middlemen in the medicine business that negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and help determine what medications are covered by insurance firms. (Dropping these provisions shaved hundreds of pages out of the legislation.)

The bill would have ended in Medicaid plans the practice of “spread pricing,” where PBMs charge a health plan more for a drug than what they pay to the pharmacies that dispense it, pocketing the difference. For Medicare plans that cover seniors, the bill required PBMs to pass along all rebates and fees that are based on a percentage of a drug price to their health plan clients, a reform commonly called “delinking” designed to eliminate incentives to promote expensive drugs over cheaper ones.

RFK Stadium transfer

The original legislation included a provision that would transfer control of the land in Washington, D.C., where RFK Stadium sits from the federal government to the District government. That would have enabled Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to negotiate with the Washington Commanders about a possible new stadium for the NFL team on the site near the Anacostia River, moving from their current home in Maryland. It also would let the District decide the future of the property even without a new stadium deal.

Musk on Wednesday, before the provision was dropped, recirculated a claim on X that the legislation included $3 billion for a new NFL stadium in the District. The provision, however, included no new federal funding - it even specifically banned the use of federal funds for a new stadium.

Pay raises for members of Congress

The original legislation would have allowed a 3.8 percent cost-of-living pay bump for lawmakers to take effect, which would result in a pay raise of $6,600. They make $174,000 a year now.

Musk reposted a claim that the legislation includes a “40% pay raise for Congress,” calling it “unconscionable.” He also cited an account that had said on X that the legislation would raise pay for members of Congress to $243,000, up from $174,000.

Congress has blocked all of its pay increases since 2009, adding language to spending bills each year that cancels the otherwise-automatic raises.

Targeting ‘junk fees’

The original version of the spending package included two bipartisan bills that aimed to crack down on so-called “junk fees,” specifically by requiring ticket sellers and hotels to disclose any service charges and other add-ons up front to customers, rather than waiting until the end of the checkout process.

Lawmakers have been focused on ticket fees, in particular, since Ticketmaster botched early sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022.

Childhood cancer research

The revised resolution dropped the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, which was named for a 10-year-old Virginia girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor. The legislation was signed into law by President Barack Obama, has historically drawn bipartisan support and has put about $125 million toward childhood cancer research over the past decade. The language in the now-abandoned resolution would have reauthorized the program for another seven years. The House had passed a version of it in March.

The funding for the childhood cancer research program is set to expire now, according to a spokesman for Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Virginia), the key sponsor of the measure in the House. The bill would have included more than $170 million over the duration of the extension.

Criminalizing some ‘deepfake’ images

The revised legislation also jettisoned a bipartisan provision that would have criminalized the publication of nonconsensual, intimate images, known as revenge porn, as well as sexual images and videos generated by artificial intelligence, called deepfakes.

The proposal would have also required social media sites to have policies in place to remove such imagery.

Restrictions on investment in China

Congress was initially set to pass as part of the legislation a measure restricting U.S. investments in China, expanding existing rules currently being implemented by the Treasury Department. The legislation also would have affirmed presidential authority to impose economic sanctions on advanced technologies in China, according to the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.