Which bills or amendments were central to the March 2025 shutdown negotiations and floor votes?

1. The Senate’s March funding bill: the immediate center of the fight

Hours before a midnight deadline, the Senate advanced a Republican-authored spending measure to keep most of the government operating at 2025 funding levels, sending the measure to the House and making that single bill the focal point of the floor votes and last-minute negotiations ^[1]; Senate passage came amid sharp Democratic opposition and was described as an essentially party-line 54–46 action that avoided a shutdown for the contained jurisdictions ^[1].

2. Amendments on the floor: where the fight sharpened

Multiple amendments to the Senate package were offered and failed during the March floor process, and those votes became the vehicle for policy and political signaling — for example, an amendment to eliminate funding for “DOGE” was debated and failed but attracted support from Senator Lisa Murkowski, illustrating how single-issue amendments could peel off GOP votes and complicate coalition-building ^[1].

3. Competing “end shutdown” proposals: S.499 and H.R.5542 as structural alternatives

Beyond the immediate stopgap, two notable legislative proposals framed the longer-term negotiation: the Senate’s Government Shutdown Prevention Act of 2025 (S.499), which would have enacted phased reductions in continuing appropriations — starting with continuing appropriations at 94% for an initial 90-day period and then reducing by 1% for each subsequent 90-day period — and H.R.5542, the House’s End Government Shutdowns Act, which proposed a different tapering structure (99% initial funding for 30 days, then 1% cuts every 30 days) as an automatic backstop to avert immediate funding lapses ^{[2] [3]}.

4. Broader legislative context and the partisan fault lines

The March votes cannot be divorced from larger fights over taxes and programmatic changes: the spending bill under consideration was separate from parallel GOP efforts to extend individual tax cuts from the Trump-era first term and to pay for those extensions through offsets elsewhere in spending, a tension that increased leverage for hardliners and hardened Democratic opposition to a narrow short-term funding vehicle without substantive protections for priorities like health-care subsidies ^[1].

5. What the reporting shows — and what it does not

Available reporting clearly pins the March 17 action to a Republican-written Senate spending bill and records the amendment skirmishes and partisan votes around it ^[1], and it documents the existence and basic mechanics of two preventive bills, S.499 and H.R.5542 ^{[2] [3]}; however, the supplied sources do not provide full texts of the specific March amendments beyond the DOGE example, do not catalog every floor roll call offered that day, and do not show whether S.499 or H.R.5542 were operationally used in March negotiations rather than serving as background policy proposals ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

6. Bottom line: what was central to the March negotiations and votes

Concretely, the March shutdown cliff was resolved — in the Senate at least — by passage of a Republican-led stopgap spending bill funding at 2025 levels (the immediate legislative vehicle) and by amendment votes on that measure (including the prominent DOGE amendment) that highlighted intra-party fractures; separately, S.499 (Senate) and H.R.5542 (House) represented the consequential, competing structural proposals for preventing future funding lapses that shaped bargaining positions though neither was the single short-term vehicle that the Senate used on March 17 ^{[1] [2] [3]}.