United States President Donald Trump signed a new government finance bill on Wednesday, ending a Republican-Democrat standoff over the bill and the longest government shutdown in US history.

The federal shutdown, which began when Democrats in the Senate refused to sign off on the finance bill unless it included amendments to extend healthcare subsidies for low-income Americans, which the Republicans refused, dragged on for 43 days and left government workers without pay and agencies paralysed without funding.

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Trump signed the new bill hours after the House of Representatives voted to approve a package passed earlier by the Senate that would reopen federal departments and restart food assistance programmes.

“With my signature, the federal government will now resume normal operations,” Trump said late on Wednesday.

What is in the bill, and what isn’t?

During the shutdown, an estimated 750,000 federal employees were furloughed – sent home without pay – according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Thousands of essential workers, including police, FBI and air traffic controllers, were required to continue working without pay.

Now that a finance bill has been approved by Congress and signed by Trump, furloughed employees will return to work and will receive back pay.

Among other things, the bill authorises funding for food assistance programmes such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – also known as “food stamps” – and the legislative branch of government until the end of January 2026.

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However, the bill does not extend health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which Democrats had been demanding before they would agree to pass the funding bill. Tax credits for this scheme – which was passed in 2010 under President Barack Obama to expand health insurance coverage and which benefits more than 22 million low-income Americans – are due to expire on December 31.

Centrist Democrats and Republicans have agreed, instead, to hold another vote in December to decide on the healthcare subsidies separately. However, there is no guarantee that an extension of those subsidies will be approved.

How did the bill get passed in the Senate?

Healthcare subsidies were at the heart of Democrats’ demands during the funding battle. When the initial bill was proposed by Senate Republicans, most Democrats opposed it. Republicans refused to back down on subsidies, meaning no agreement could be reached, and the bill was not approved by Congress.

During a series of votes in the 43 days since the government shutdown began, Democratic senators rejected reopening the government on 14 occasions, insisting on extensions to the ACA tax credits.

However, six Democratic senators and two independents finally broke ranks and voted with the Republicans in the Senate on November 9.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was one who voted against the measure, saying “for months and months, Democrats have been fighting to get the Senate to address the healthcare crisis. This bill does nothing to ensure that that crisis is addressed.”

However, Schumer was criticised by some Democratic senators and representatives for not joining the Democratic senators who caved and joined the Republicans because they wanted to end the shutdown. Some demanded that Schumer step down from his position as minority leader.

When the bill to reopen the government moved to the House of Representatives, many Democrats there continued to oppose it, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“We’re not going to support a partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the healthcare of the American people,” Jeffries said in a news release issued by his team on Tuesday evening.

Other Democrats in the House also opposed the measure. “To my colleagues: Do not let this body become a ceremonial red stamp from an administration that takes food away from children and rips away healthcare,” said Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill during her last speech on the US House floor before she leaves Congress to assume office as the new governor of New Jersey.

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How did House of Representatives members vote?

Ultimately, the opposing Democrats were defeated.

The US House of Representatives includes 219 Republicans, 214 Democrats and two empty seats. The bill passed in the House with a 222-209 vote.

A total 216 House Republicans voted in favour of the finance bill. They were joined by six House Democrats who wanted an end to the shutdown: Henry Cuellar from Texas, Donald Davis from North Carolina, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from Washington, Jared Golden from Maine, Adam Gray from California and Thomas Suozzi from New York.

The remaining 207 Democrats voted against the bill. They were joined by Republicans Thomas Massie from Kentucky and Greg Steube from Florida. One Democrat, Bonnie Watson Coleman and one Republican, Michael T McCaul, did not vote.

Washington, DC-based newspaper The Hill reported that Massie’s vote against the bill was expected. He typically votes against spending bills, even if the bills are drafted by his own party, if he considers the levels of spending unreasonable.

Massie also reposted an X post by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – the only Republican to vote against the measure in the Senate – who argued that the bill contained unnecessary provisions that would harm Kentucky’s hemp farmers and small businesses.

In an X post on Wednesday, Steube wrote that he opposed the bill because the resolution included a measure allowing certain senators to personally sue the Justice Department using taxpayer money to fund their legal action.

“I could not in good conscience support a resolution that creates a self-indulgent legal provision for certain senators to enrich themselves by suing the Justice Department using taxpayer dollars,” Steube wrote.

What happens to workers and programmes affected by the shutdown now?

A return to normal government is “easier said than done”, Scott Lucas, a professor of US and international politics at the Ireland-based University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute, told Al Jazeera.

“You’ve got to restore staff, you’ve got to restore services, you’ve got to restore payments.”

Furloughed employees

Furloughed employees could return to work as early as Thursday. It is unclear how soon government operations and services will resume fully, however.

Lucas also said that based on the measure passed, the US government now has to ensure that the furloughed employees stay on their jobs and are not fired, “which the Trump administration has threatened to do”.

“There are going to be disruptions and, of course, the big thing is you will not get back that estimated $7bn to $14bn in lost productivity,” Lucas said. That is the estimated cost to the economy – roughly 1.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this quarter – caused by the delayed salaries of furloughed employees during the shutdown.

Food assistance programmes

The funding for SNAP, which more than 40 million Americans benefit from, ran out on October 31, and the Trump administration blocked the programme from accessing emergency funds from the US Department of Agriculture’s disaster and nutrition assistance accounts.

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This week, a spokesperson for the White House budget office said that the food assistance roll-out would begin within hours of the government reopening.

But recipients could still face lengthy delays. “Those payments will now have to be arranged, which means that, you know, you have a backlog that, that you’ll have to get through,” said the spokesperson.

Air traffic controllers

On Friday last week, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an emergency order to 40 airports to reduce flights by 6 percent because of the shortage of air traffic controllers caused by the shutdown. Hundreds of domestic flights were cancelled, causing havoc for travellers. If the government shutdown had not ended, this had been expected to be extended to 10 percent of flights.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that air traffic controllers will receive 70 percent of their pay within 24 to 48 hours of the shutdown ending.

“Right now, he’s urging the air traffic controllers to continue to work without pay until that’s resolved,” Lucas explained.

On Wednesday, the New York Times cited unnamed representatives of the airline industry, estimating that flights could return to normal within a week of the shutdown ending.

For flights to resume as usual, the Transportation Department must ensure enough air traffic controllers are back at work to minimise staffing-related flight delays. FAA chief Michael Duffy then needs to lift the emergency order which reduced the flights.

Construction projects

Several government-funded construction and infrastructure projects worth $11bn were suspended during the shutdown and it is unclear how and when progress will resume. These include work on two federally owned aging bridges across the Cape Cod canal in Massachusetts and a waterfront park in San Francisco.

“It’s not just a question of ‘will they be resumed and when they resume’, it’s a question of whether that federal funding will be restored, and that’s not clear at this point,” Lucas said.

“Federal funding might be restored for construction infrastructure projects, but what happens here is, is that you have to restart the pipeline for the funding. All of these things have had contracts. There will be contracts in terms of the timing of the delivery of funds, there will be, the congressional authorisation which is behind all that.”

Release of key economic data

The monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for October was not released, as it should normally have been, during the shutdown. Additionally, the release of key inflation data set for mid-October was postponed.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it is likely that these still won’t be released even if the shutdown ends because, she said, the shutdown prevented surveyors from going into the field to collect raw, time-sensitive data.

Leavitt said that yet-to-be-collected data “will be permanently impaired, leaving our policymakers at the Fed flying blind at a critical period”.

This means policymakers in the Federal Reserve and other sectors have no access to key benchmark figures normally used to set interest rates and guide economic policy. Investors and businesses also do not have key data to make forecasts. In historical records, data from October 2025 will create a blind spot, distorting trend analysis in the future.

What happens next?

While government funding has now been secured until the end of January, there is still no resolution on the issue of the ACA tax credits. If the standoff over healthcare is not resolved by the end of January, the US could therefore face another possible shutdown.

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“Now they have said that they will schedule a vote in the Senate on this in mid December, but of course scheduling a vote to extend the tax credits doesn’t mean that the credits that the vote will succeed,” Lucas said.

“So we will be back at the end of January to square one effectively,” he added.

“We could definitely face another standoff in January – in fact, I think the chances are increased. If we do not have some arrangement in terms of keeping the premiums down for these tens of millions of Americans, the Democrats have now made that their headline issue. It’ll be the issue all the way into the 2026 elections.”

January will be the point at which the Trump administration will need to request approval from Congress for another extension of government funding, and will need the support of Democrats again.

Lucas said that in the meantime, Americans relying on the ACA and other health insurance programmes will see their insurance premiums more than double between November and the end of January without the tax credits. He said this will increase healthcare costs, meaning “they’ll either have to bear by cutting elsewhere, or they’ll have to go without insurance, which has obvious consequences”.