Shutdown countdown: US Congress has 4 days to fund government

WASHINGTON – The fourth partial shutdown of the US government in a decade was four days away on Wednesday.

House Republicans have pre-emptively rejected a bipartisan Bill advancing in the Senate that would fund agencies through mid-November.

Congress needs to pass legislation that Democratic President Joe Biden can sign into law by midnight on Saturday. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands of federal workers, as well as those who provide a wide range of services, from economic data releases to nutrition benefits, will be furloughed.

The Senate voted by an overwhelming 77-19 on Tuesday to begin debate on a measure that

would fund the government through Nov 17,

as well as authorising about US$6 billion (S$8 billion) for domestic disaster responses and another US$6 billion in aid to Ukraine.

Leading House Republicans dismissed the Senate stop-gap measure out of hand. They said any short-term funding measure to pass Congress with their approval must address the flow of migrants across the US border with Mexico.

“The Senate Bill really just continues to fund Biden’s open-border plan. The country wants to address the open border. We need to address the open border,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, the Chamber’s No. 2 Republican.

But Republicans who control the House by a narrow 221-212 margin have not proposed their own measure to fully fund the government and are instead trying to pass a series of Bills for the full fiscal year that begins on Sunday.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing threats from hardline members of his own party. They rejected a deal he negotiated with Mr Biden in May for US$1.59 trillion in discretionary spending in fiscal 2024, demanding instead another US$120 billion in cuts.

A small handful of the hardliners have also threatened to oust Mr McCarthy from his leadership role if he passes a spending Bill that requires any Democratic votes to pass.

Mr McCarthy said House Republicans would probably bring their own stop-gap measure to the floor on Friday.

Repeated brinkmanship

The stand-off comes four months after Washington flirted with defaulting on the nation’s more than US$31 trillion in debt, a move that would have rocked financial markets worldwide.

The repeated brinkmanship has worried credit-rating agencies, with Moody’s this week

warning that a shutdown could hurt the nation’s creditworthiness.

Another downgrade of the US credit rating could push borrowing costs – and the nation’s debt – even higher.

The funding fight focuses on a relatively small slice of the total US budget, which will come to US$6.4 trillion for this fiscal year.

Lawmakers are not considering cuts to popular benefit programmes like Social Security and Medicare, which are projected to grow dramatically as the population ages.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, urged her colleagues to consider the Senate’s stop-gap measure, known as a continuing resolution.

“The bipartisan continuing resolution introduced by the Senate is a reasonable approach to keeping the government open while we finish our work on final 2024 funding Bills,” she said in a statement. “It is not perfect, but it prevents a catastrophic and avoidable shutdown.”

Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell also urged action, saying: “Government shutdowns are bad news, whichever way you’d look at it.”

In a sign of rising concern among senators about the risk of a shutdown, Democrat Michael Bennet and Republican Joni Ernst on Tuesday proposed a Bill that would require the 100 senators to remain on or near the Senate floor in the event of a shutdown – with the threat of being arrested by the Chamber’s sergeant-at-arms for absence.

Hardline Republicans, including Donald Trump, front runner for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, have dismissed the risks of a shutdown and in some cases actively pushed for one. REUTERS