The House nixed plans for more votes this week after GOP leadership failed to advance a defense spending bill a second time as the government heads toward a possible shutdown in nine days.

Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), the majority whip, announced on Thursday that the House stood in recess. He said no further votes were expected for the rest of the day, discussions related to appropriations were ongoing, and the Rules Committee remained on-call throughout the weekend.

“Members are advised that ample notice will be given ahead of any potential votes tomorrow or this weekend,” Emmer added. “Please stay tuned to future updates for more information.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) faced a setback earlier in the day when a small group of Republicans joined with Democrats in shooting down a bid to start consideration of a defense appropriations bill. The tally was 216-212, with slightly more GOP holdouts voting against advancing the legislation than there were earlier in the week.

“I just voted NO to the rule for the Defense bill because they refused to take the war money for Ukraine out and put it in a separate bill,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said in a post to X, adding that polling shows growing opposition to Congress authorizing more funding for the Ukraine-Russia war.

A government shutdown could happen at the end of the month if lawmakers fail to come to an agreement on spending legislation to fund various federal agencies in the next fiscal year. Ultimately, both chambers of Congress and the White House need to come to an agreement for any bill to get final approval.

Talk of a short-term spending bill drawn up by the GOP-controlled House prompted backlash from Senate Democrats, as well as some House conservatives who are pushing for concessions. McCarthy even nixed a procedural vote on a 30-day continuing resolution amid the opposition from fellow Republicans.

Now with the recess, the plan is to try and pass the remaining 11 out of 12 individual appropriations bills starting next week despite the likelihood that the Democrat-led Senate will oppose that strategy, too, according to multiple reporters. The House passed a Veterans Affairs spending bill in July.

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McCarthy is working to navigate the spending ordeal as he faces threats from within his own party about a bid to oust him from the speakership. Last week, the California Republican said the “threats don’t matter” and that he would keep focusing on “what’s the right thing to do for the American people.”

President Joe Biden took aim at Republicans in a speech last week, criticizing them over their effort to secure cuts in spending and a commitment to what he called “MAGAnomics.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), in a weekend interview with ABC News, said House Republicans were engaged in a “civil war.”

Former President Donald Trump, who is running a 2024 campaign for a second term in the White House, urged congressional Republicans to “defund all aspects” of what he said was Biden’s “weaponized” government.

Boston University announced Wednesday that it would conduct an “inquiry” into Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research amid complaints about its culture.

The inquiry will be a broader version of a previous “examination,” looking at the center’s grant management practices, a spokesperson for Boston University told The Boston Globe.

The inquiry also comes shortly after layoffs at the center. Kendi recently laid off about 20 employees, more than half the center’s staff, the university confirmed last week.

Kendi, a prominent critical race theory scholar, has become an influential voice on “antiracism” over the last several years, especially after his book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” became a New York Times bestseller in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

He has drawn criticism for promoting the theory that all racial disparities are due to racism. Kendi has also faced criticism for his book “Antiracist Baby,” a children’s picture book that introduces children to the concept of antiracism.

The Center for Antiracist Research was established in June 2020, just days after Floyd’s death, when Kendi was hired as a history professor at Boston University. Since then, the center has raised tens of millions of dollars from donors.

The center managed to accomplish certain projects, such as teaming up with The Boston Globe to launch a digital publication called The Emancipator. However, many other projects have gone uncompleted, such as a Racial Data Tracker, which would be “the nation’s largest online database of racial inequity data in the United States.”

The center “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level,” Phillipe Copeland, a Boston University professor who worked at the center, told the Globe.

Copeland skewered the center in a Facebook post on Sunday, saying the layoffs amount to “employment violence and trauma.”

“Boston University needs to explain how one of its premier Centers ended up in this situation and how mass layoffs are ‘antiracist.’ This act of employment violence and trauma is not just about individual leaders. It’s about the cultures and systems that allow it to occur,” Copeland wrote on Sunday.

“I don’t know where the money is,” said Saida Grundy, another Boston University professor who worked at the center.

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Kendi reportedly did not delegate authority, which slowed the center’s operations.

He was also on leave from the center during the last several months, and when he returned last week, he reportedly laid off about 20 staffers over Zoom, according to one of the professors at the center.

Kendi “takes strong exception to the allegations made in recent complaints and media reports,” the Boston University spokesperson said.

The center’s scholars have also produced very little research, and the two research papers they have put out have been co-authored with other academics, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.

Global health professor Elaine Nsoesie, who leads the Racial Data Tracker project at the center, co-authored a January paper that concluded that areas with more black residents had more “dilapidated buildings.”

Management and organizations professor Sanaz Mobasseri, another scholar at the center, co-authored a paper that stated, “We treat White men as the dominant group and Black people as the archetypal subordinate group in U.S. society.”

How long Boston University’s probe into the center will take is unclear.