US Congress passes bill to avert government shutdown with just hours to spare

The US Congress averted a Christmastime government shutdown early on Saturday after weeks of tense negotiations that went down to the wire, passing a bill to fund federal agencies through mid-March.

With the midnight deadline already expired by minutes, senators dropped normal procedure to fast-track the package to a vote, halting government shutdown preparations and saving Christmas for more than 800,000 workers at risk of being sent home without pay.

"It's good news that the bipartisan approach in the end prevailed... It's a good outcome for America and the American people," Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor.

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

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

That would have meant non-essential operations winding up, with up to 875,000 workers furloughed 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 Elon Musk, his incoming "efficiency czar," 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 agreed 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 like law enforcement would have continued working but would only have been paid once government functions were back up.

Many parks, monuments and national sites would have closed at a time when millions of visitors are expected.

'Let it begin'

Lawmakers avoided all that holiday-season pain by funding the government until March 14 in a package that includes $110 billion (R2 trillion) in disaster aid and financial relief for farmers.

It is essentially the same as a bill that failed miserably in a vote Thursday - except without a two-year suspension of the country's self-imposed borrowing limit demanded by Trump.

The influence of Musk, the world's richest man, over the Republicans - and his apparent sway with 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 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," Georgia House Republican 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."

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 Johnson put a positive sheen on events, telling reporters after the House passed the funding package that January, when 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," Johnson told reporters. "Things are going to be very different around here."

AFP