WASHINGTON: The US Congress averted a Christmastime government shutdown 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.

US President Joe Biden signed into law the bill passed by Congress to fund the government through mid-March, the White House said.

Musk created much of drama that angered Republicans over his interference in the legislation

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.

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 in disaster aid and financial relief for farmers.

It is essentially the same as a bill that failed miserably in a vote on 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.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2024