House Republicans on Tuesday quietly closed off a way for members of Congress to force votes demanding information from the Trump administration, the latest instance of the G.O.P. preemptively ceding the legislative branch’s powers to avoid challenging President Trump.
The move temporarily blocked an effort by Democrats on the Armed Services Committee to compel the administration to provide information on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of private Signal group chats to discuss military matters, including strikes on Yemen.
It also froze in place more than a dozen other resolutions Democrats have introduced in the past few months demanding answers from Mr. Trump’s team about its slashing of the federal bureaucracy and what Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency were doing inside federal agencies.
Republican leaders accomplished the maneuver by tucking language into a procedural measure needed to begin debate on unrelated legislation, which passed on a party-line vote. It was the third time in the past two months that they have availed themselves of an arcane strategy to help their members skirt politically thorny votes that might have forced them to show their views of controversies in the Trump administration.
Republicans have twice pushed through language that temporarily barred lawmakers from forcing a vote on President Trump’s tariffs, shielding their members from having to weigh in on his trade policies that have alarmed some constituents and donors. As a result, lawmakers in the House cannot force a vote on undoing Mr. Trump’s tariffs until October at the earliest.
The vote on Tuesday would stop the House from voting on “resolutions of inquiry,” measures that formally request information from the executive branch.
Those measures are governed by special rules that can allow House members to force a vote on them if they have not been addressed by the committee overseeing them within a certain period of time.
Democrats have filed several such resolutions, which have been defeated in committee votes.
The Armed Services Committee has not taken up the resolution targeting Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal since it was introduced at the end of March, and the deadline for its consideration is approaching.
The language approved on Tuesday would declare the period from the day of approval until Sept. 30 one long calendar day for the purpose of resolutions of inquiry, making it impossible for them to ripen and be forced to the floor until at least October.
House Republican leaders inserted the language into a measure needed to bring up five measures undoing Biden-era environmental regulations.
Democrats used similar procedural changes to blunt resolutions of inquiry between 2020 and 2022, when they controlled the House.
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