GOP Offers Stopgap Bill to Fund Government

Republicans controlling the House have unveiled a stopgap bill to keep the government open past a shutdown deadline of midnight Friday.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen says the one-week measure would buy time to wrap up talks on a $1 trillion-plus catchall spending bill that's the center of bipartisan talks on Capitol Hill. He says those negotiations are going well.

The temporary bill is likely to come to a House vote Friday in the expectation the Senate would immediately send it to President Donald Trump for his signature.

Talks on the larger spending bill have progressed in fits and starts, with the Trump White House backing away from demands that it include money to begin construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — though other stumbling blocks remain.

The White House has assured lawmakers it will continue making payments to insurers under Democrat Barack Obama's health care law.

That's a reversal for President Donald Trump who had threatened to withhold the money.

Both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and a senior administration official confirmed the move, which could both provide stability to the individual insurance market and remove the issue as a stumbling block to bipartisan negotiations over a government-wide spending bill to keep agencies open.

The current spending bill expires at midnight on Friday.

The so-called cost-sharing payments help lower-income people with out-of-pocket medical expenses, but Trump had threatened to withhold them as leverage. That sparked a fierce backlash among Democrats such as Pelosi, who responded with a threat to bring down the spending bill if the threat were carried out.

Pelosi and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney spared over the issue in back-and-forth statements on Wednesday.