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The US Congress has averted a government shutdown following days of chaos on Capitol Hill, after the Senate passed a stop-gap funding measure in the early hours of Saturday.
The Senate passed the bill 85-11, with the measure winning support from both parties. The bill also passed through the House earlier on Friday and is now headed to US President Joe Biden, who will sign it into law later on Saturday, according to the White House.
Technically Congress missed the midnight deadline to head off the shutdown, but not by enough to cause disruption. The federal government had ceased preparing for a shutdown before the Senate voted and no agencies halted operations, the White House said.
The bill that passed did not include any change to the debt ceiling, despite president-elect Donald Trump’s call for lawmakers to use the legislation to scrap the mechanism, which limits the federal government’s borrowing.
“After a chaotic few days in the house, it’s good news that the bipartisan approach in the end prevailed”, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said from the floor before the vote, calling the stop-gap “a good bill”.
Passage of the bill through the two chambers of Congress ended a week of volatility in Washington as Trump and his ally Elon Musk flexed their influence over hardline Republicans, pushing them to reject what they said were “giveaways” to Democrats.
But Democrats also claimed victory, with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries saying his party had “stopped extreme Maga Republicans from shutting down the government”.
He added: “House Democrats have successfully stopped the billionaire boys club, which wanted a $4tn blank cheque by suspending the debt ceiling.”
The bill’s progress appeared uncertain on Friday after Musk expressed his continued disdain for the measure: “So is this a Republican bill or a Democrat bill?”
The bill that passed was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s third attempt to push the legislation through the chamber after Trump torpedoed the first bipartisan agreement earlier in the week.
The new bill was almost identical to Johnson’s second one, but stripped out any move to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, despite Trump’s demands. It extends government funding at current levels through March 14, and provides aid for natural disaster relief and farmers.
Johnson said after the bill passed the House that he had been in “constant contact” with Trump and spoken to Musk shortly before the vote and received their blessing.
Trump “knew exactly what we were doing and why and, and this is a good outcome for the country. I think he certainly is happy about this outcome as well”, he told reporters on Capitol Hill.
Johnson said he asked Musk: “‘Hey, you want to be Speaker of the House?’ . . . He said, ‘this may be the hardest job in the world’. It is.”
The passage in the House marked a victory for Johnson, who had vowed earlier in the day that the US would “not have a government shut down”.
A shutdown would have temporarily closed parts of the government and suspended pay for federal employees. Previous government shutdowns have forced hundreds of thousands of federal workers to be furloughed.
Democrats, angry that the earlier bipartisan deal was ditched, have blamed Musk for inserting himself in the process this week, triggering more turmoil in Congress just ahead of the US holiday season.
“At the behest of the world’s richest man who no one voted for, the US Congress has been thrown into pandemonium,” said Democrat Rosa DeLauro about Musk on Thursday.
Some top Republicans also appeared to criticise the interventions by Trump and Musk.
“I don’t care to count how many times I’ve reminded . . . our House counterparts how harmful it is to shut the government down and how foolish it is to bet your own side won’t take the blame for it,” Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate Republican leader, said on Friday.
“That said, if I took it personally every time my advice went unheeded, I probably wouldn’t have spent as long as I have in this particular job.”
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