In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was doomed to eternally roll a boulder uphill, only for it to roll back down whenever it neared the top. In real life, the closest analogue may be the U.S. Congress, which seems trapped in the never-ending process of keeping the U.S. government funded, only for the deals to fall apart. But, on Tuesday afternoon, a narrow vote in the U.S. House put Congress closer to funding the government than it has come in nearly 30 years. And even that triumph nearly failed.

In a razor-thin vote of 217-214, the House of Representatives passed a measure (H.R.7148) containing five appropriations bills, with a two-week-long continuing resolution on the Department of Homeland Security. The measure already passed the Senate and now heads to President Trump, who promised to “sign it into Law, IMMEDIATELY!” Once the measure is signed into law, Congress will have successfully passed 11 out of 12 appropriations bills for the current fiscal year.

For House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the moment must have seemed nearly like completing the task of Sisyphus. Just over a week ago, Johnson had led his chamber to pass a bill featuring the last six appropriations bills, completing the full set of 12. “The naysayers said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong. House Republicans just finished passing all 12 appropriations bills — restoring regular order, cutting spending, locking in Trump-era priorities, and ending Biden-era budgets,” Johnson celebrated. “No omnibus. No backroom deals. Just hard work and results.”

The bill was pre-negotiated with Senate Democrats and sure to pass.

But then, with the shooting death of anti-ICE agitator Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Senate Democrats took a page from the Vader Handbook of Negotiation and declared they were “altering the deal.” One of the six appropriations bills included in the package funded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Democrats absolutely refused to approve DHS funding without legislating constraints on the conduct of federal immigration officers.

As the name “homeland security” implies, the DHS appropriations bill funds many critical departments, include the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the TSA, and FEMA. Ironically, the negotiating snag would not defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), because ICE operations already received an additional $75 billion in funding through the Big Beautiful Bill last summer.

The timing of the Democrats’ time-out call made a partial government shutdown inevitable. Funding for departments covered in the six appropriations bills expired on Friday, January 30, and the House had already left town anyways. To the credit of both sides, Senate Democrats did hammer out a deal with the White House relatively quickly. On Friday, the Senate passed (71-29) an amended package, which stripped out the DHS funding bill. The revised legislation contained the other five funding bills, as well as a two-week extension of DHS funding.

Due to the amendments, the bill had to return to the House for approval, which meant that the government partially shut down on Saturday, before the House could come back into session. This came only four months after Senate Democrats triggered a full government shutdown on October 1, 2025, over their refusal to consider protections on Obamacare subsidies that would prevent taxpayer-funded health insurance from covering abortions or gender transition procedures for minors. That shutdown became the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

To prevent a repeat debacle, President Trump lobbied aggressively for the bill, writing that, “We need to get the Government open, and I hope all Republicans and Democrats will join me in supporting this Bill, and send it to my desk WITHOUT DELAY. There can be NO CHANGES at this time.”

However, House Democrats refused to work with Republicans to move the bill, arguing they had been cut out of the negotiation process between Senate Democrats and the White House. This prevented Speaker Johnson from fast-tracking the bill for a floor vote on Monday, which would have required a vote with a two-thirds majority (Johnson is currently working with a House majority of two seats). Instead, the bill passed the House Rules Committee on Monday night in an 8-4 party-line vote.

On Tuesday, the full House voted 217-215 to advance the legislation, with Democrats providing no support. That vote was held open for more than half an hour as Republican leadership jawboned Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn.) into switching his vote to support the measure (Rose and several other members initially wanted to see voter ID requirements for federal elections added to the package).

In the final vote for passage, only 196 Republicans supported the bill package, while 21 Republicans (mostly conservatives) voted against it. However, 21 Democrats crossed the aisle to provide just enough support for the bill to pass. Such a tidy outcome suggests that House Democrats may have had a secret deal to provide the votes Johnson could not find among Republicans.

Thus, despite numerous hiccups, Speaker Johnson’s House caucus delivered. The process and the result may have been uglier than the Millennium Falcon, but they succeeded in extricating nearly every government funding bill from a Cloud City-like quagmire. The House very nearly bat 1.000 for the year (albeit several months late), but 11 out of 12 is a vast improvement over the slovenly omnibus packages of past congresses.

Questions still linger over DHS funding, which was only extended through February 13. That leaves congressional partisans only 10 days to both work out an agreement and navigate it through both chambers, unless they extend their own deadline. But, for now, Johnson and his team can congratulate themselves on a job well done — messy, chaotic, and far from ideal — but done.