Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday was toiling to find a way out of a shutdown after President-elect Donald J. Trump torpedoed the spending deal the speaker struck with Democrats this week, leaving Republicans without a strategy to fund the government past a Friday night deadline.
As Mr. Johnson met with his deputies on Thursday morning in his office in the Capitol, lawmakers eager to return home ahead of a scheduled winter recess were left in limbo with no clear solution to keep federal funds flowing past 12:01 a.m. on Saturday.
“The situation is fluid,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the Republican whip, told reporters on Thursday morning in what appeared to be a major understatement.
Mr. Johnson was caught between two seemingly untenable options. Mr. Trump has effectively killed the massive bipartisan deal, loaded with unrelated policy changes, that he negotiated to fund the government through mid-March. That plan would have drawn substantial votes from Democrats, but a Republican revolt over it fueled by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk sapped it of even the modest G.O.P. support it would have needed to pass the House.
What the president-elect demanded instead — that Republicans pair a stripped-down government funding bill with a measure raising the debt ceiling or getting rid of it altogether — is also likely to be opposed by a number of Republicans. And it would be a tough sell to Democrats, who are furious that Republicans have jettisoned their agreement.
Mr. Johnson’s plan to avert a shutdown imploded on Wednesday amid a backlash by G.O.P. lawmakers that was driven in part by Mr. Musk, who spent much of the day trashing the measure on social media and threatening the political future of any Republican who supported it.
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