House Republicans on Saturday unveiled a measure to fund the government through Sept. 30, boosting spending on the military and daring Democrats to oppose it and risk being blamed for a government shutdown that would begin after midnight Friday.
The 99-page legislation would slightly decrease spending overall from last year’s funding levels, but would increase spending for the military by $6 billion, in a nod to the concerns of G.O.P. defense hawks that stopgap measures would hamstring the Pentagon. It would not include any funds for any earmarks for projects in lawmakers’ districts or states, saving roughly $13 billion, according to congressional aides.
The bill provides a slight funding boost for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an additional $485 million — but gives the administration more flexibility on how the agency can spend it. It also increases funding for the federal program that provides free groceries to millions of low-income women and children, known as W.I.C., by about $500 million.
It was unclear whether the legislation could pass the Republican-controlled Congress. Speaker Mike Johnson will need to navigate the bill through his extremely narrow House majority as early as Tuesday and has just a vote or two to spare if Democrats are unanimously opposed. The pressure would shift quickly to the Senate if House Republicans can pass the legislation, raising the question of whether Democrats would mount a filibuster against the bill and trigger a shutdown.
While conservative House Republicans have in the past dug in and opposed such spending bills, forcing Mr. Johnson to rely on Democrats to keep the government open, President Trump called on Republicans to unite and push this measure through so he and Republicans on Capitol Hill could focus on their new budgetary and tax-cutting plans.
“Great things are coming for America, and I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site on Saturday, shortly after Republican leaders unveiled the bill.
Leading Democrats in both the House and Senate quickly made it clear on Saturday that they were adamantly opposed to the stopgap, saying it would provide too much discretion to the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led effort to drastically reduce spending on federal programs.
“I strongly oppose this full-year continuing resolution, which is a power grab for the White House and further allows unchecked billionaire Elon Musk and President Trump to steal from the American people,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. “By essentially closing the book on negotiations for full-year funding bills that help the middle class and protect our national security, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have handed their power to an unelected billionaire.”
But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she was inclined to back the legislation even though she would have preferred to push through new individual spending measures.
“Our focus must be on preventing an unnecessary and costly government shutdown on Friday, March 14, at midnight,” Ms. Collins said in a statement. “Government shutdowns are inherently a failure to govern effectively and have negative consequences all across government.”
She and the other leaders of the congressional spending panels had been in bipartisan talks in recent days aimed at finding a way to pass the traditional spending bills, which would give Congress more say in how federal funds are spent and test how far the Trump administration was willing to go in defying lawmakers on spending issues.
But time ran out on the negotiations, and Mr. Johnson and administration officials made the decision that it would be to the White House’s advantage to freeze funding for the year and push through whatever changes they could convince Republicans to accept on mainly party-line votes.
“Congress — not Trump or Musk — should decide through careful bipartisan negotiations how to invest in our states and districts — and whether critical programs that support students, veterans, families and patients get funded or not,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
The government has been running on a series of stopgaps known as continuing resolutions since Oct. 1 because of a failure to pass the annual spending bills. The approach is considered inefficient because it does not adjust spending for changes in circumstances.
This year would be the first time the Pentagon has operated under a yearlong continuing resolution, and the Trump administration has sought added flexibility to make adjustments in its military spending.
