Trump Administration Live Updates: Senate Passes Deal to Reopen Government

“Everything is precarious,” said Ms. Hamilton, a 27-year-old doctoral student who was bound for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for her field work studying oak trees.

Buffeted by the foul weather and delays related to the government shutdown, Ms. Hamilton said she was still processing the news that a group of senators who caucus with Democrats had broken ranks to move to end the shutdown.

“What was the point if you were just going to give in anyway?” Ms. Hamilton said.

At airports across the United States on Monday, travelers were checking their phones and scanning flight displays for cancellations and delays.

Republicans in Congress were pushing to end the longest U.S. government shutdown, even without concessions that Democrats wanted. The package would need to pass the Senate and then go to the House before being signed by President Trump.

In the meantime, travelers braced for more disruption. Flight reductions were expected to increase throughout the week, to 10 percent on Friday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

James Laidler, a researcher traveling to Philadelphia to attend an annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, said he was worried about the fate of his Monday flight from O’Hare.

The society’s president would not be present because of the cancellations, Mr. Laidler, 40, said.

And he wondered whether he would be able to make it back to Chicago.

“I’m fully prepared for chaos,” he said.

Chicago was far from the only airport affected by the cancellations, which the F.A.A. began imposing on Friday at 40 busy airports because the dearth of air traffic controllers risked compromising safety.

The travel turmoil led some fliers to embark on time-consuming detours.

When Paresh Raval, a food company quality manager from Toronto found out on Sunday that his flight to Mumbai, India, with a stop in Zurich, had been rescheduled, he took action.

He and his wife boarded a bus that afternoon to Newark, N.J., arriving at the city’s airport on Monday at 1 a.m.

Later on Monday morning, the couple were waiting for a direct United flight to Mumbai.

“We bought our tickets early because of the disturbances, then we were worried about the delays,” Mr. Raval, 65, said. “We did what we had to do.”

Some travelers said they had been willing to sacrifice some degree of inconvenience at the airport for the goals that Democrats were pursuing earlier in the shutdown. Abby Donahue, a 43-year-old project manager at a nonprofit, flew from Ann Arbor, Mich., to the San Francisco Bay Area for work on Friday and was concerned about possible delays as she waited for her flight back home on Monday.

“I was like, Well, I can wait 20 minutes more at the airport, fine. Because, you know, I want to be able to afford health care and I want programs like SNAP to be funded all the way,” she said, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

As of Monday evening, about 2,000 flights had been canceled, about 8 percent of the day’s schedule, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm.

Ms. Hamilton had an update on her journey, however, on Monday afternoon. Her United flight was taking off for Mexico.

The lawsuit came as a group of Democrats in the Senate broke rank on Sunday to support a funding measure that, if adopted by the Senate and House, would end the shutdown after more than 40 days of deep financial pain and sputtering government services.

According to the lawsuit, immediately as the shutdown began on Oct. 1, the White House kicked into high gear to halt billions destined for Democratic-led states, in an apparent attempt to gain leverage as lawmakers settled into a prolonged fight over funding. It argues the decision amounted to “intentional discrimination” and “bare animus,” inflicting deliberate hardship on states that voted against Mr. Trump in the last presidential election.

In a social media post on Oct. 1, Mr. Vought announced the government would terminate close to $8 billion for climate-related projects in 16 states, all represented by senators who caucus with the Democratic Party.

As the projects were officially terminated, according to the complaint, they would be unlikely to be revived even once the shutdown ends.

The coalition argues in the suit that the move clearly violated the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause, and asks that a judge restore the canceled funding.

“Under bedrock equal protection principles, the government must have some legitimate state interest when it treats one group differently from a similarly situated group,” the coalition said in the suit.

With the shutdown looming in September, President Trump told reporters that he welcomed making cuts in parts of the country that he viewed as hostile to his agenda.

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sept. 30.

He followed up by publicly directing Mr. Vought to make those cuts, writing on Truth Social “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

The Energy Department confirmed on Oct. 2 that it had terminated 321 funding awards to 223 projects, including some focused on building electric vehicle charging stations and others designed to offset energy costs for consumers or reduce methane emissions. Every single grantee was based in a Democratic-led state.

“One need not be a statistician to understand this partisan skew did not happen by chance,” the lawsuit said.

Other cuts the White House sought during the shutdown also affected Republican states.

Even as federal courts ordered the government to restore food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the White House vehemently opposed funding the program, going as far as to order states to claw back benefits already provided to millions of low-income families.

Aside from the funding at issue in the lawsuit, Mr. Vought also moved in October to suspend around $18 billion supporting two flagship transit projects in New York City, reaching roughly $28 billion total in other Democratic-led cities and counties.

In the lawsuit on Monday, the groups suing said they were caught up in indiscriminate retaliation that was likely to jeopardize their work long past the shutdown.

“They did nothing wrong other than being located in, or carrying out an award in, a state whose citizens engage in political speech that the government disfavors,” the groups’ lawyers said in the suit.

The provision would make it a violation of the law to not notify a senator if their phone records or other metadata was taken from a service provider like a phone company. There are some exceptions, such as 60-day delays in notification if the senator is considered the target of an investigation.

The language of the bill states that “any senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any federal department or agency.”

Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Each violation would be worth at least $500,000 in any legal claim, according to the bill language. The bill would also sharply limit the way the government could resist such a claim, taking away any government claims of qualified or sovereign immunity to fight a lawsuit over the issue.

The Republican senators whose phone records were subpoenaed as part of the investigation were: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania also had his phone records subpoenaed but would not be eligible because he is a member of the House.

Mr. Smith requested the phone records of the lawmakers in 2023, but they were not formally told of the subpoenas until earlier this year. Republican lawmakers, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, have denounced the investigative tactic used against lawmakers, referring to it as inappropriate spying.

It was unclear which Republican lawmaker added the language on phone searches to the bill.

Mr. Smith, through his lawyers, has denied any wrongdoing, saying it was a legitimate and authorized investigative tactic to understand the actions of Mr. Trump and his inner circle, suggesting it was not meant to scrutinize the actions of the lawmakers themselves.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, accused Republicans of hiding a provision in the funding bill that would give millions of taxpayer dollars “to a handful of Republican senators who helped Trump try to overthrow the government.”

Mr. Wyden said in a statement that every American “should have the right to be told if the government spies on them,” but added that this bill “takes a reasonable protection against government surveillance and wraps it in an unacceptable giveaway of your tax dollars to Republican senators.”

Seizing someone’s phone records does not mean investigators can listen to conversations or know the contents of the conversations. The phone records, often referred to as metadata, are like phone billing records, in that they show what numbers that phone called and received calls from, how long the calls lasted, and often where the calls were made.

The flying restrictions began on Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to reduce flights by 4 percent at 40 busy airports. The cuts are needed to relieve pressure on air traffic controllers who have been working without pay for more than a month, the F.A.A. said. The reductions are expected to rise throughout the week, to 10 percent on Friday.

But Thanksgiving may be spared. Eight Democratic senators backed a deal on Sunday that could end the shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. Airlines welcomed the prospect.

“Our team is in regular conversations with government leaders in Washington, D.C., and we are urging them to reach a deal immediately,” the American Airlines chief operating officer, David Seymour, said in a message to employees on Monday. “There are many steps ahead, and the next several days will continue to be challenging.”

The cuts this weekend were concentrated among flights offered by three of the largest carriers — American, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. The carriers canceled 8 percent to 11 percent of their scheduled flights. United and Delta said they had confirmed their planned cancellations through Wednesday.

“I won’t mince words: This weekend’s operation was incredibly challenging for our industry,” Mr. Seymour said. He added that almost a quarter-million customers were affected by delays and cancellations over the weekend.

From Friday through Saturday, nearly 18 percent of scheduled flights were canceled at Newark Liberty International Airport. Nearly 15 percent were cut at LaGuardia Airport in New York and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Delays were widespread, too. On Sunday, about a third of flights that were not canceled were delayed more than 30 minutes. At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, which also contended with a snowstorm, only half of flights left within 30 minutes of their scheduled departure time.

By midday Monday, however, nearly 85 percent of flights had arrived on time and most delays were less than 30 minutes, according to Cirium.

Ash Hamilton, 27, was so worried that her flight from O’Hare to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, would be canceled on Monday morning that she bought two tickets.

“I’m on United but bought a second ticket with American Airlines, because I need to get there today,” she said. Ms. Hamilton said she planned to spend a month in Mexico studying arroyo oak trees. “I’m doing fieldwork, and everything is precarious.”

Ms. Hamilton blames the Republicans for the shutdown, she said. And while she is glad that it may be ending, she thought Democrats had given up without achieving their goals.

As of noon on Monday, the F.A.A. had closed many major airports to most unscheduled flights — a category that includes private and charter jets. But there were few delays attributed to controller staffing, a contrast to the weekend, when staffing was cited for lengthy delays at many airports. The agency has said the flight restrictions are necessary to improve safety and relieve controllers who have been overworked for years but are under particular stress because of the shutdown.

On social media, President Trump said controllers who did not show up to work would be “docked,” though he did not explain what that meant. He also said he would recommend bonuses of $10,000 for controllers who took no time off during the shutdown.

Airlines also dealt with more routine problems, including airport construction and bad weather. Nearly 26,000 flights were scheduled on Sunday, with a similar number on Monday, but that is expected to drop to about 23,000 each on Tuesday and Wednesday, which should bring some relief.

Planes also fly less full in early November. That has allowed airlines to trim busy routes, moving passengers to other flights heading to the same destinations. But that will get harder to do as Thanksgiving approaches, because planes will have fewer empty seats to accommodate displaced travelers. According to Cirium, sales for flights over the five days spanning Thanksgiving slowed slightly in the first week of the month, though they remained higher than last year’s.

Airlines have avoided canceling more crowded flights between hub airports and to international destinations while making it easier for customers to change or cancel flights.

Instead, the cuts have focused on flights between smaller airports and larger cities. Such flights often accommodate no more than about 75 passengers.

American, Delta and United outsource many regional flights to subsidiaries or other carriers like SkyWest Airlines and Republic Airways, which have been disproportionately affected by the cuts. Airlines are typically paid for those canceled flights, though they may face costs to move planes and crews.

Robert Chiarito, Karoun Demirjian and Christine Chung contributed reporting.

Stefany Shaheen is running for a House seat in New Hampshire on a health care platform and with a boost from her family name and the legacy of her mother, Jeanne Shaheen, the state’s former governor and now its senior senator.

So when the elder Ms. Shaheen negotiated to move toward ending the government shutdown without a Republican agreement to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats have demanded, the younger Ms. Shaheen had a problem.

“We need to both end this shutdown and extend the ACA tax credits,” Stefany Shaheen said in a statement on social media. “Otherwise, no deal.”

In an interview on Monday morning, she said that “clearly we had different approaches here,” adding: “I can’t speak for her. I think she did what she believes is right.”

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol later on Monday, Jeanne Shaheen said: “My daughter’s independent, she’s always been independent. That’s why she’s going to be a great congresswoman.”

She added, “And the messages from New Hampshire have been very positive.”

Democrats are universally furious at the eight senators who helped broker the shutdown-ending deal without any concessions, as well as at the party’s leadership over a perception that it failed to stop the deal. No prominent Democrats have defended the deal. There are calls for political retribution and resignations.

Supporting her mother’s vote would have left the younger Ms. Shaheen in a much weaker spot for her primary race to fill the seat being vacated by Representative Chris Pappas. (He is running for the Senate seat now occupied by Jeanne Shaheen, who is retiring.)

In the interview, Stefany Shaheen said that she had talked with her mother about the Senate discussions but declined to get into details. She would not say if she thought her mother, 78, would have voted the same way had she been running for re-election. “All I can do is stand up and say what I believe is right,” Stefany Shaheen said.

Next door in Maine, Angus King III, the Democratic son of another senator who negotiated the Democratic retreat, is in his own primary race for governor. The younger Mr. King has been quiet so far on the deal.

Maura Sullivan, another Democrat running for Mr. Pappas’s seat, was less muted about Jeanne Shaheen’s role.

“I didn’t serve our country in the Marines to watch leaders cave when health care for 9 million Americans is on the line,” she wrote on social media. “Democrats should be standing firm, not surrendering when Americans’ health is at stake.”

Another New Hampshire Democrat in the race was even less subtle.

“Why did your mom vote for it?” Heath Howard, a state representative, wrote in response to Stefany Shaheen’s post, adding in another post that he was “ashamed” that the state’s two senators had voted for the deal.

Robert Jimison contributed reporting.

The administration urged the justices to stop an order issued by a lower court earlier this month, which had required the government to finance benefits in full for the roughly one in eight Americans who receive monthly federal aid to buy groceries.

Despite having ample funds in reserve, President Trump has refused to supply that money, offering a stark contrast with the other ways he has rearranged the budget during the shutdown — including reprogramming billions of dollars to pay the officers conducting mass deportations.

At one point, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, described the court’s instructions — and its work to interpret the law — as “massively inappropriate.” He claimed that conflicting court orders had sowed “upheaval,” without acknowledging the administration’s role in the chaos. And he claimed that the courts could “affect” the work to end the shutdown, despite the president’s continued absence from any talks.

Yet it remained unclear whether the Supreme Court would even need to rule on the government’s request. The Trump administration acknowledged the possibility in the very opening of its filing, which said the nascent deal in Congress “would end the shutdown and moot this application.”

The request arrived on a day when roughly two dozen states pressed ahead with their own legal campaign, which aimed to unlock long-frozen federal funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. That case unfolded in a federal court in Massachusetts, where a judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out a directive that would force states to “undo” some of the benefits they had already paid.

Before the hearing, several state officials said that the Trump administration’s decision to continue fighting — particularly as Congress had finally identified a way to fund the government — had been especially punitive, vindictive and harmful.

Letitia James, the Democratic attorney general of New York, said in a news conference that states would use “every legal pathway to ensure families get the benefits they are entitled to.”

“It is a moral imperative,” she said, “and no one should go hungry because their own government is refusing to feed them.”

Ms. James was joined by other state attorneys general, including Matthew J. Platkin of New Jersey, who described the federal government’s attempts to slash food stamps as “the most heinous thing” he had seen in office.

For all of the persistent legal wrangling, the developments on Monday still offered a pathway to resolving the weekslong battle waged by local governments, religious groups and nonprofits, which have been trying to spare roughly 42 million low-income Americans from severe financial hardship while much of Washington remains largely inoperative.

The legal saga began late last month, after a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the administration to explore ways to furnish food stamp payments for November. When the government failed to comply quickly — and as some families faced the prospect they might not receive any aid at all — the judge instructed the government to tap all of its available funds to pay benefits in full.

Shortly after that ruling, many states began to provide those benefits to some of the Americans who receive SNAP and had been waiting days for aid. But the Trump administration refused to back down, turning first to an appeals court, which denied its first request, before escalating the fight to the Supreme Court.

There, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a temporary pause, known as an administrative stay, to buy the appeals court more time to review the matter. That scrambled the work underway to ship payments to low-income Americans, and by the weekend, created vast uncertainty and disruption felt by families around the country.

By late Sunday, though, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit handed down its latest decision: It denied the administration’s request in a scathing, 29-page opinion that also severely faulted its tactics during the shutdown.

“For low-income Americans, SNAP is a vital bulwark against hunger and food insecurity,” the appellate court said. “Access to food is, of course, a basic human need.”

The appellate judges said the government “knew full well” that its original plan — making only partial SNAP payments — “would be technically difficult.” And the opinion acknowledged that the Trump administration had “proceeded to do nothing to attempt to solve that problem” in ways that would have preserved the food stamp program and spared it from significant delays.

Diane Yentel, the president of the National Council of Nonprofits, one of the organizations that had sued the government over SNAP, praised the appeals decision in a statement on Monday. “The administration’s callous and cruel use of hungry Americans as a political tool must end,” she said.

Sarah Nir contributed reporting.

But many Democrats have said for weeks that such a promise would be insufficient to win their votes to reopen the government, because it was unlikely to pass in the Republican-led Congress. If the subsidies expire, it would significantly increase insurance premiums for millions of Americans.

Three of the eight senators — Angus King of Maine, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — have supported a Republican-written stopgap bill to fund the government since the shutdown began. On Sunday, five others joined them, paving the way for the spending measure to advance toward a full vote in the Senate. That drew anger and outrage from many of their Democratic colleagues who said the party should have held firm to protect the health care subsidies.

The compromise still needs to win approval in the Senate, pass the Republican-controlled House and be signed by President Trump to bring the shutdown to an end.

Here are the eight senators — none of whom face re-election in 2026, and two of whom are retiring at the end of their terms — who broke ranks:

• Senator Angus King of Maine: An independent who caucuses with Democrats, Mr. King was one of the lead negotiators of the deal. He said many “people are being hurt” by the shutdown, and that pain had pushed his colleagues to support a deal that would reopen the government without extending Affordable Care Act subsidies.

• Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia: Mr. Kaine said on Sunday evening that he was backing the deal after securing a provision in the temporary spending bill to reverse layoffs made during the shutdown and ensure that furloughed workers would receive back pay.

• Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois: The No. 2 Senate Democrat, who is retiring at the end of his term, Mr. Durbin underlined that the legislation advanced on Sunday night was different from the one voted down by Democrats 14 times over the course of the shutdown because it included the provision to reverse layoffs. “This bill is not perfect, but it takes important steps to reduce their shutdown’s hurt,” Mr. Durbin said in a statement.

• Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania: For the 15th time, Mr. Fetterman voted with Republicans to end the shutdown. In a post on social media, he called himself “a consistent voice against shutting our government down,” and apologized to members of the military, food stamp recipients, government workers and Capitol Police officers “who haven’t been paid in weeks.”

• Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire: Ms. Hassan said in a statement that now was the time for Republicans to engage in “serious, bipartisan negotiations” to extend the expiring health insurance subsidies.

• Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire: Ms. Shaheen, who is retiring at the end of her term, said at a news conference that the legislation “is our best path” toward reopening the government and extending the health care tax credits.

• Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada: Ms. Cortez Masto said in a statement that while the government must extend the expiring health insurance subsidies, “that can’t come at the expense of the millions of Americans across our country impacted by a shutdown.”

• Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada: Ms. Rosen defended her vote in a statement, while accusing Republicans of “weaponizing their power in alarming ways” during the shutdown. She cited the withholding of food stamp benefits and reductions in air travel.

Eight senators in the Democratic caucus voted to advance the measure, which would fund most federal agencies through January. That indicated there were enough votes to end weeks of gridlock that has shuttered the government for 40 days, leaving hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, millions of Americans at risk of losing food assistance and millions more facing air travel disruptions.

But the deal prompted a quick and fierce backlash among Democrats, many of whom were livid that their colleagues had backed down from the party’s central demand in the shutdown fight: the extension of health insurance subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year, sending premiums soaring for millions of Americans.

The compromise measure included a provision that many Democrats had sought to reverse layoffs of federal workers made during the shutdown. It also came with a commitment from Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, to allow a vote in December on extending the expiring health insurance tax credits for a year. Many Democrats have said for weeks that such a pledge would be insufficient to win them over, since such a bill has appeared all but certain to die in the Republican-led Congress.

The Democratic defectors’ decision allowed Republicans, who have been unable to push through a temporary spending bill over Democratic opposition, to finally cobble together the 60 votes needed to do so, though reopening the government could still take some time.

Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats and was one of the lead negotiators of the deal, said that the length of the shutdown and the pain it was inflicting on Americans had changed the calculus for some of his colleagues, pushing them to support a deal with Republicans that would reopen the government without the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies they had originally sought.

“I think people were saying ‘We’re not going to get what we want,’ although we still have a chance,” Mr. King said, noting Mr. Thune’s commitment to hold a vote on the matter. “But in the meantime, a lot of people are being hurt.”

One critical Democratic convert, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, said on Sunday evening that he was backing the deal after securing the provision in the temporary spending bill to reverse layoffs made during the shutdown and ensure furloughed workers would receive back pay.

“This legislation will protect federal workers from baseless firings, reinstate those who have been wrongfully terminated during the shutdown, and ensure federal workers receive back pay, as required by a law I got passed in 2019,” Mr. Kaine said in a statement. “That’s a critical step.”

But the retreat reopened the Democratic rift within the party that emerged in March, when a bloc of Democratic senators voted with Republicans to keep the government open, prompting a progressive backlash.

The shift this time was particularly remarkable given that the deal did not protect the health insurance tax credits, which Democrats had spent weeks arguing was a crucial piece of any government funding agreement. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who had held his party together for more than a month making that case, opposed the deal.

“This health care crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home that I cannot, in good faith, support this C.R. that fails to address the health care crisis,” Mr. Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor, referring to the continuing resolution that would temporarily fund the government.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, also said that House Democrats would not back any such deal.

“Donald Trump and the Republican Party own the toxic mess they have created in our country, and the American people know it,” he said in a statement.

Still, were the plan to pass the Senate, House Democrats would have no chance of defeating it if Republicans held together in support.

The core of the compromise that moved ahead on Sunday is a spending package that came out of negotiations among a bipartisan group of moderates, led by the leaders of the Appropriations Committee. It includes a new stopgap measure that would fund the government through January, plus three separate spending bills to cover programs related to agriculture, military construction and legislative agencies for most of 2026.

“Under our legislation, all federal employees, including members of our military and Coast Guard, Capitol Police officers, Border Patrol agents, T.S.A. screeners, air traffic controllers — all will receive their back wages,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said.

Those three bills, released on Sunday omit most of the deep spending cuts that Mr. Trump had proposed in his budget this year.

Still, the deal was causing intense consternation across a wide swath of the Democratic caucus, from progressives to moderates.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, said any retreat from the party’s demands on health care would be “a policy and political disaster.”

Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, a moderate who was initially involved in the bipartisan talks, also sounded deeply dissatisfied.

“I always said we’ve got to do something concrete on health care, and it’s hard to see how that happened,” she said on Sunday evening as she entered a closed-door party meeting to discuss the deal.

And in a reflection of how the deal split their party, Senator Mark Warner broke with his fellow Virginia Democrat, Mr. Kaine, and said he could not back the agreement despite the provisions protecting federal workers. He said he had long pushed for those steps, calling them “a critical step in protecting our public servants from this administration’s campaign of retribution.”

“But I cannot support a deal that still leaves millions of Americans wondering how they are going to pay for their health care or whether they will be able to afford to get sick,” Mr. Warner, who is up for re-election next year, added.

Democrats had agonized privately for days over whether to prolong the shutdown or find a quick bipartisan compromise. Many of them had made the case that their party’s victories in last week’s elections in New York, New Jersey and Virginia reflected that their fight was resonating with voters and suggested that they must show they were continuing to press to lower health care costs.

But centrists in the party caucus believed that the spiraling effects of the shutdown — including the threat to SNAP food assistance and the air travel chaos — meant that blocking the funding bills had grown untenable.

In the end, eight broke off on Sunday night to side with Republicans and allow the measure to advance: Mr. King, Mr. Kaine and Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois; John Fetterman of Pennsylvania; Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both of New Hampshire; and Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada.

The bipartisan spending package contains some provisions that run counter to Mr. Trump’s wishes. While he has moved to eliminate the Food for Peace program, which sends surplus American crops to communities around the world that are experiencing famine and starvation, the bill would provide $1.2 billion for the program, which many Republicans hailing from farm states have championed.

Negotiators in the Senate also shut down a bid by House Republicans to hobble the Government Accountability Office, a roughly century-old agency formed to help Congress keep track of federal spending. The G.A.O. has twice determined this year that Mr. Trump’s actions violated rules that prohibit him from unilaterally canceling funding, and the agency is allowed under existing law to sue to force a president to release illegally withheld funds.

While the House had proposed to halve funding for the agency, the Senate-written measure would keep its funding flat. The measure also jettisoned a provision by House Republicans that sought to bar the agency from suing the White House in the future.

Still, the package omits any mention of the health care subsidies that Democrats made a centerpiece of the shutdown fight. They had spent weeks demanding that Republicans agree to permanently extend the tax credits in exchange for their votes to fund the government, a condition that the G.O.P. refused to meet.

On Friday, Mr. Schumer had scaled back that demand, saying Democrats would vote to reopen the government if the legislation included an extension of the health tax credits for just one year.

Republicans immediately rejected that proposal as well, calling it a nonstarter.

At one point on Saturday, 18 out of 22 controllers in Atlanta did not show up to work, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“It’s only going to get worse,” Mr. Duffy said. “I’d look to the two weeks before Thanksgiving, you’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle.”

Airlines tried to weather the restrictions throughout the weekend by making careful cuts, but the disruptions grew each day and will become harder to manage as the restrictions rise to 10 percent by this Friday and possibly even higher.

“The degree of complexity increases for every flight that we are not going to operate,” said Steve Olson, the head of system operations and airports at JetBlue Airways. “That means that we have a crew that may not be in the right position to be able to operate their next flight or an aircraft that may not be in the right place.”

Airlines canceled hundreds of flights each day from Friday through Sunday at airports serving major cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. The cuts were concentrated among flights offered by three of the largest carriers, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, which dominate many of those busy airports.

American canceled about 740 flights on Friday and Saturday, or more than 6.5 percent of its schedule for those days, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. Delta canceled about 640 flights across both days, or over 7.3 percent of its schedule, while United cut over 450 flights or more than 5.2 percent of its schedule.

But the disruption was worse on Sunday. More than 2,000 flights had been canceled by midafternoon, making it the year’s fourth worst day for cancellations, behind a handful of days in January when storms disrupted flying, according to Cirium. Delta had canceled more than 14 percent of its schedule by midafternoon on Sunday, while American and United had each canceled more than 9 percent.

Delays have also been on the rise throughout the weekend, affecting more than 8,300 flights as of Sunday afternoon.

See Where Flights Have Been Canceled Across the U.S.

Thousands of flights across the United States have been canceled, with deeper cuts looming in the coming days.

Throughout the first few weeks of the shutdown, controller staffing had a limited effect on cancellations, according to the trade group Airlines for America, which represents the largest passenger and cargo airlines. Through Oct. 29, the nation’s six largest passenger airlines canceled fewer than a dozen flights because of controller staffing problems, it said, citing an analysis of F.A.A. data through Saturday.

Since then, though, those airlines have canceled more than 1,200 flights because of controller staffing problems. On Friday alone, 865 flights were canceled for reasons related to controller staffing, about 87 percent of which were because of the F.A.A. directive to reduce flying at the 40 busy airports.

In a social media post, Mr. Duffy said that private jets were also being diverted from busy airports to smaller ones to better accommodate commercial flights. On CNN, Mr. Duffy said that an average of four controllers retired daily before the shutdown, but that number is now up to 15 to 20. He also said that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, had offered the help of military reservists trained as air traffic controllers, but Mr. Duffy said he wasn’t sure if he would be able to use them.

Thousands of travelers were affected the weekend disruptions, but airlines benefited somewhat from the timing of the cuts.

Planes are generally less full in early November because many people reserve travel for later in the month, around Thanksgiving. That gave the airlines the flexibility to trim on busy routes, moving passengers from canceled flights to others still operating between the same destinations.

Airlines also focused cuts on less popular regional routes, dropping flights linking tiny airports with larger cities. Flights to small, regional airports can typically accommodate about 50 to 75 passengers, while flights between big cities can often carry twice as many people, if not more. While American cut more than 5 percent of its schedule on Friday, for example, only about 2 percent of its passengers that day were on affected flights.

Most of the weekend disruption was caused by staffing shortages and the reduction in flying, but airlines were also dealing with more routine problems. At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, for instance, flights were delayed more than half an hour, on average, on Sunday afternoon because of runway construction. A snowstorm was forecast for the evening, which could bring further disruption.

American, Delta and United outsource many regional flights to subsidiaries or other carriers like SkyWest Airlines and Republic Airways, the two operators most affected by the cuts.

By midday Sunday, more than 290 SkyWest flights had been canceled, amounting to about 11 percent of its schedule for the day, according to FlightAware, an aviation data firm. Republic canceled about 260 flights, or about 23 percent of its schedule.

Those two airlines mostly operate flights for American, Delta and United and are typically still paid for canceled flights, though they may face added costs to move planes and crews into place for other flights. In a statement on Saturday, SkyWest said that cancellations were “being managed days in advance” and that the company continues to operate “the vast majority” of its flights.

Still, most routes, even regional ones, retained at least some service through the weekend, though there were a few examples of carriers dropping routes with one or two flights. (On Sunday, for instance, United cut its only round-trip flight from its hub in Newark to Myrtle Beach, S.C.)

But airlines generally avoided cutting more congested flights between hub airports or to destinations abroad. Most cuts were carried out by U.S. airlines, though a handful of flights were canceled by international carriers. Many airlines allowed customers to change flights or request refunds, even if they had restrictive, nonrefundable tickets.

Because of the disruptions, some travelers were reconsidering flying, exploring other options, including renting cars, taking buses or trains or just staying home.

Airlines are well practiced at managing flight cancellations caused by myriad factors, like bad weather, staffing shortages and technological outages. In deciding which flights to cancel, crisis teams use software to help identify candidates to cut and consider a range of factors, including how cancellations will affect the placement of customers, pilots and planes. But there are limits to how much disruption the industry can handle.

“The airlines’ challenges will worsen as the Thanksgiving holiday period approaches,” the credit rating agency Fitch Ratings said in a research note on Friday. Thanksgiving is among the busiest travel periods of the year and will “leave little room for airlines to reaccommodate displaced passengers, amplifying revenue loss and customer service costs,” the note said.

The industry escalated calls for an end to the government shutdown, the longest in history, as the flight limits took effect at the end of the week. Airlines for America said that more than 4 million passengers had already experienced delays or cancellations caused by air traffic controller staffing problems since the shutdown began in early October.

“We implore Congress to act with extreme urgency to get the federal government reopened, get federal workers paid and get our airspace back to normal operations,” the group said on Friday. A record 31 million people are expected to travel over about a dozen days around Thanksgiving, it added.

The F.A.A. said it was reducing flights to improve safety and relieve air traffic controllers who had been overworked for years, but were under particular stress after working for more than a month without pay.

Some lawmakers and experts questioned the measure, asking the agency to share the data justifying its decision. But others welcomed the proactive approach.

“Pressures are building in the system,” Jennifer Homendy, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a social media post last week. “This is safety management, the very foundation of our aviation system, and it’s the right thing to do.”