Last-minute funding bill averts US shutdown

There is anger even among Republicans after president-elect Donald Trump torpedoed an earlier deal

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 20: U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks to the press at the U.S. Capitol on December 20, 2024 in Washington, DC. The House approved a stopgap funding bill Friday to avert a government shutdown, extending funding into mid-March and including disaster relief, but omitting a debt ceiling suspension sought by President-elect Donald J. Trump after Republican opposition. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images/AFP (Photo by Kent Nishimura / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)

US President Joe Biden has signed a funding bill averting a Christmas government shutdown after negotiations in congress went down to the wire.

The last-minute legislative wrangling was brought on by incoming president Donald Trump, who with influential billionaire Elon Musk pressured Republicans to abandon an earlier bipartisan funding compromise.

Congress members then spent several days trying to hammer out another deal, with extensive halts to government services hanging in the balance.

With the Friday midnight deadline (Saturday AEDT) ­already expired by a few minutes, senators dropped normal procedure to fast-track a vote on the new package, funding the government until mid-March.

“This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted,” Mr Biden said.

“But it rejects the accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires that Republicans sought.”

The Democrats control the Senate, so there was never much doubt that the new funding package would get a rubber stamp after the party was crucial in helping the Republican majority in the House pass the bill earlier on ­Friday.

But with senators often dragging their feet over complex legislation, there were fears that the funding fight might spill into this week.

That would have meant non-essential operations winding up, with up to 875,000 workers suspended without pay and as many as 1.4 million more required to work without pay.

Congress’s setting of government budgets is always a fraught task, with both chambers closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. President-elect Donald Trump and tech billionaire Mr Musk, his incoming “efficiency tzar”, created much of the drama this time around by pressuring Republicans in an 11th-hour intervention to renege on a funding bill they had painstakingly worked out with Democrats.

Two subsequent efforts to find compromise fell short, leaving ­Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson at the last-chance saloon as he spent much of Friday huddling with aides to find a way to keep government agencies ­running.

If the funding bill had failed, non-essential government functions would have been put on ice. Employees in key services such as law enforcement would have continued working but would only have been paid once government functions resumed. Many parks, monuments and national sites would have closed at a time when millions of visitors are expected.

Congress avoided all that holiday-season pain by funding the government until March 14 in a package that includes $US110bn ($176bn) in disaster aid and financial relief for farmers.

But stripped from the original funding bill were pharmaceutical reforms, congressional pay rises and tightened restrictions on US investments in China – the removal of which some Democrats tied ­directly to Mr Musk, the chief executive of Tesla.

“Musk’s ties to China and Tesla’s significant investments in the country raise significant questions as to why he urged house ­Republican leadership walking away” from the original bipartisan deal, Democrat congresswoman Rosa DeLauro wrote in a letter to the congressional leadership.

The influence of Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, over the ­Republicans – and his apparent sway with Mr Trump – has ­become a focus for Democratic ­attack, with questions raised over how an unelected citizen can wield so much power.

There is growing anger, even among Republicans, over Mr Musk’s interference after he trashed the original funding agreement in a blizzard of posts – many of them wildly inaccurate – on his social media platform X.

“Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in congress,” Republican congressman Rich McCormick told CNN.

“Now, he has influence, and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him. But I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them.” Mr Trump had been clear that he was willing to see a shutdown if he did not get his way, and the passage of funding legislation without his priorities included demonstrated that even his great influence over Republicans in congress has limits.

But Mr Johnson put a positive light on events, saying that January, when Mr Trump ­returns to office, would mark a “sea change” in Washington. “President Trump will return to DC and to the White House, and we will have Republican control of the Senate and the House,” Mr Johnson said. “Things are going to be very different around here.”

AFP