Biden Signs Spending Bill, Finalizing End to Shutdown Drama

President Biden’s signature, while technically coming after the midnight deadline for a shutdown, ensured that there would be no lapse in government funding.

President Biden on Saturday signed the spending package that allowed federal funds to keep flowing until mid-March, formally ending the week’s unexpected drama over the issue a few hours after the deadline for a shutdown had technically passed.

Mr. Biden’s signature came after the Senate passed the legislation early on Saturday, after a bipartisan vote in the House on Friday evening. The bill, which maintains the current level of government funding and also provides $100 billion in disaster relief for regions still recovering from storms and $10 billion in direct aid for farmers, punted the spending deadline to the early months of the Trump administration, when Republicans will control both chambers of Congress.

“This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released after he signed the bill. “But it rejects the accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires that Republicans sought, and it ensures the government can continue to operate at full capacity.”

Mr. Biden had been all but absent from the chaotic spending negotiations that gripped Washington for several days as the shutdown deadline loomed. (In a statement earlier in the week, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, accused President-elect Donald J. Trump of ordering a shutdown and said: “A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”)

Two earlier versions of the bill that Mr. Biden signed had failed to make it to his desk. The first, a sprawling package attacked relentlessly on Wednesday by Elon Musk on social media and eventually by Mr. Trump as well, didn’t even make it to the House floor for a vote. A more stripped-down version carrying a suspension of the debt limit, which Mr. Trump had demanded, failed to pass the House amid a rebellion by three dozen fiscally conservative Republicans, who joined nearly all Democrats in voting it down on Thursday night.

The spending fight demonstrated the limited grip that Mr. Trump has on the right-wing faction of the Republican Party that is adamantly opposed to taking on more debt.

“To take this bill, to take this bill yesterday, and congratulate yourself because it’s shorter in pages, but increases the debt by $5 trillion, is asinine,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, said in a scathing speech on Thursday night, referring to the legislation that included the debt limit increase. “I’m absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible.”

But Mr. Trump appeared less concerned about taking on more debt than with avoiding responsibility for dealing with the debt ceiling, which was expected to be reached sometime in January.

“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Wednesday, “but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”

Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday put a revised bill without the debt-ceiling provision to the vote, and it passed 336 to 34. One hundred and seventy Republicans voted in favor, joining all Democrats except one who voted “present.”