Two bills on pediatric cancer research and a football stadium site had been left out of the main spending package, but passed early Saturday as separate legislation.
After a tumultuous few days, President Biden on Saturday signed into law a spending bill that had been heavily trimmed down to 120 pages from 1,547. It had lost provisions targeting hidden fees on concert tickets and criminalizing the publication of some deepfake pornography.
But two of the measures that had been dropped from the final bill, which continued most government spending at the same level and included funding for disaster relief and aid to farmers, were salvaged as separate bills and passed by the Senate.
The bills, which include funding for pediatric cancer research and changes in the terms of the lease of a Washington, D.C., stadium, passed the House in the spring, allowing them to quickly clear the Senate without amendments and through a voice vote that required unanimous consent.
Here’s a rundown of how those two bills were revived at the last minute.
When Speaker Mike Johnson jettisoned a bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown after facing fierce criticism from the billionaire Elon Musk, right-wing Republicans and President-elect Donald J. Trump, Democrats decried the omission of four bills related to pediatric cancer research and treatments from the revised funding bill.
“Republicans would rather cut taxes for billionaire donors than fund research for children with cancer,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said Friday on social media.
But in the end, the Senate on Friday renewed the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, named after a 10-year-old girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor in 2013, in a unanimous vote. The bill extended $12.6 million in annual cancer research funding through 2031, allowing the National Institutes of Health to continue researching the biology of childhood cancer and structural birth defects.
