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Elon Musk has appeared to urge Republican lawmakers to vote down a three-month funding stopgap to avert a government shutdown on December 21, stating on X, "This bill should not pass" adding "Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?", referring to legislation seen to include extraneous measures. 

• House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced the stopgap yesterday after weeks of negotiations that have irked Republican conservatives and moderates alike. The final text includes USD$100 billion in disaster relief and USD$10 billion for farmers, neither of which is offset.
• The 1,500-page bill also includes language to curb some outbound investment in the Chinese tech sector and a Democrat-sponsored provision to extend duty-free imports for Haitian textiles. A measure to direct more spending back to pharmaceutical companies was dropped - another blow to the industry after President-elect Trump said on Monday he will "knock out the middleman" to bring down drug prices.
• Musk is widely seen as one of Trump's most influential inner circle members. However, several previous public pronouncements have fallen flat, notably when he supported Howard Lutnick for Treasury Secretary, decrying Trump's ultimate selection - Scott Bessent - as "a business-as-usual choice."
• Although the bill is likely to pass the House with strong Democrat support, the level of Republican dissent sets up a period of potential instability in the House when Johnson must navigate his Jan 3 re-election vote, revisit FY25 govt funding, and start work on Trump's big-ticket agenda - all of which needing near-unanimous support from conservative deficit hawks.
• Punchbowl News reports: "Several senior House Republican leadership sources told us that more than 100 GOP lawmakers are likely to vote against the bill."

There is still no schedule for PM Francois Bayrou to name the parties that will form his new administration or the individuals that will sit in his Council of Ministers. Bayrou is under pressure to announce his picks as soon as possible in order to seek to kick-start the French political system out of its current stasis. 

• Le Monde reports that "proposals for names were made yesterday at noon", the president of the MoDem group [Bayrou's party] in the National Assembly, Marc Fesneau, announced on TF1 on Wednesday morning. "The discussions are still very advanced", he added, considering that there is a "need for teams to be able to be formed in the ministries before Christmas..."
• Earlier, outgoing Foreign Minister Bruno Retailleau added another potential complication to the gov't formation, saying that "The conditions "are not met at the moment" for [the conservative Les Republicains] to join the government,". Without Les Republicains, the Bayrou gov't risks being just the centrist parties that formed the Ensemble alliance in the legislative election comprising 164 of the 577 deputies in the National Assembly, a very vulnerable position to be in.
• The process could be drawn out further by President Emmanuel Macron's travel schedule. Under the French constitution, the president is required to formally appoint Cabinet picks in person. With Macron set to visit the overseas department of Mayotte on 19 Dec following the devastation caused by Cyclone Chido, the timeline for appointing a gov't could be pushed to the end of the week, or beyond.