Last-gasp agreement prevents US government shutdown

Saturday, the US Congress passed a last-minute funding bill to keep federal agencies operating for another 45 days and avert a costly government shutdown. However, President Joe Biden's request for aid to war-torn Ukraine was not included in the deal.

In a day of high-stakes brinksmanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate voted three hours before the midnight deadline to keep the lights on through mid-November with a resolution that had advanced from the House of Representatives earlier in the day.

The last-ditch "continuing resolution" was proposed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as millions of public employees were about to be sent home unpaid, jeopardising military operations, food aid, and federal policymaking.

"Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans," Biden said in a statement.

But he berated McCarthy and the House Republicans for reneging on spending levels agreed with the White House months ago -- a major reason for the shutdown near-miss -- and for stripping out support for Ukraine.

"I fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment," said the president, who signed the measure late Saturday, according to the White House.

The shutdown crisis was largely triggered by a small group of hardline Republicans who had defied their own party leadership to scupper various temporary funding proposals as they pressed for deep spending cuts.

The group of 21 hardliners had threatened to remove McCarthy as speaker if a stopgap measure they opposed was passed with Democrat support, and many Washington watchers were expecting the speaker to have to fight for his job in the coming weeks.

- Time to negotiate -

One of the group, Lauren Boebert, declined to say after the House vote whether she and her colleagues would try to force McCarthy out, but she was clearly unhappy with the outcome.

"There are too many members here who are comfortable doing things the way they've been done since the mid-'90s," she told reporters. "And that's why we're sitting at $33 trillion in debt."

McCarthy sought to instill confidence in both his own future and the likelihood of securing a final agreement by the new deadline of mid-November.

"In 45 days, we should have completed all of our tasks," he said, seemingly extending a hand to the hardliners by adding, "I welcome those 21 back in."

Arming and funding Kyiv's war against the Russian invasion has been a central tenet of the Biden administration's foreign policy, and although the stopgap is temporary, it raises questions about the political viability of renewing the multibillion-dollar flow of assistance.

McCarthy stated that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was "horrendous," but insisted that there could be "no blank cheque" for the country.

"I have a real concern of what's going to happen long term, but I don't want to waste any money," he said.

With tensions running high as Democrats pored over the text of McCarthy's proposal, one of their lawmakers, Jamaal Bowman, triggered a fire alarm in a building housing congressional offices an hour before the House vote.

Bowman's spokesman insisted it was an accident, but Republicans accused him of seeking to delay proceedings.

If Congress had failed to keep the government open, the shutdown would have begun shortly after midnight (0400 GMT Sunday) and millions of federal employees and military personnel would have been paid late.

The majority of national parks, from the iconic Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west to Florida's Everglades swamp, would have been closed to the public beginning on Sunday if the government had been shut down.

The measure buys lawmakers time to negotiate full-year spending bills for the remainder of fiscal 2024.