The US Congress early yesterday overwhelmingly passed a US$1.2 trillion budget bill, keeping the government funded through a fiscal year that began six months ago and sending it to US President Joe Biden to sign into law and avert a partial shutdown.
The vote on passage was 74-24.
Key federal agencies including the departments of homeland security, justice, state and treasury, which houses the Internal Revenue Service, would remain funded through Sept. 30 after the bill was passed in the Democratic-majority Senate.
Photo: AFP
However, the measure did not include funding for mostly military aid to Taiwan, Ukraine or Israel, which are included in a different Senate-passed bill that the Republican-led US House of Representatives has ignored.
Senate leaders spent hours on Friday negotiating a number of amendments to the budget bill that ultimately were defeated. The delay pushed passage beyond a Friday midnight deadline.
The White House Office of Management and Budget issued a statement saying that agencies would not be ordered to close, expressing confidence that the Senate would promptly pass the bill, which it did.
While Congress got the job done, deep partisan divides were on display again, as well as bitter disagreement within the House’s narrow and fractious Republican majority.
Conservative firebrand US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to force a vote to remove Speaker Mike Johnson, a fellow Republican, for allowing the measure to pass.
The 1,012-page bill provides US$886 billion in funding for the US Department of Department, including a raise for US troops. Biden, a Democrat, has indicated he will sign it.
Johnson, as he has done more than 60 times since succeeding his ousted predecessor in October last year, relied on a parliamentary maneuver on Friday to bypass hardliners within his own party, allowing the measure to pass by a 286-134 vote that had substantially more Democratic support than Republican.
For most of the past six months, the government was funded with four short-term stopgap measures, a sign of the repeated brinkmanship that ratings agencies have warned could hurt the creditworthiness of a federal government that has nearly US$34.6 trillion in debt.
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