Washington (AFP) – US lawmakers raced Friday to stave off a government shutdown set to bite within hours, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk sabotaged a bipartisan agreement that would have kept the lights on well beyond Christmas. If no deal is struck, the government will cease to be funded at midnight, and non-essential operations will start to grind to a halt, with up to 875,000 workers furloughed and 1.4 million more required to work without pay.
“Republicans blew this deal up. They did. They blew it up, and they need to fix it,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. Congress’s setting of government budgets is always a fraught task, with both chambers closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. The latest drama intensified after Republican President-elect Trump and tech billionaire Musk, his incoming “efficiency czar,” pressured his party to renege on a funding bill they had hammered out with Democrats.
Two subsequent efforts to find compromise fell short, leaving Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson at the last chance saloon as he huddled with aides to keep government agencies running. If no path forward emerges, non-essential government functions will be put on ice with employees told not to report to work. Those in key services like law enforcement would continue working but would only be paid once government functions are back up. Many parks, monuments, and national sites would close at a time when millions of visitors are expected.
The latest Congress proposal would avoid all that by funding the government until mid-March in a bill 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 Thursday — except that it would remove a two-year suspension of the country’s self-imposed borrowing limit demanded by Trump. Musk appeared again to be doing his best to marshal conservatives against the deal, as he posted: “So is this a Republican bill or a Democrat bill?”
The influence of 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.”
With barely seven hours to go until federal functions begin closing down, House Republicans were huddled at the US Capitol to iron out details and present the latest plan to Democrats. A number of Republicans consistently vote against temporary funding patches with no spending cuts, meaning Johnson will almost certainly need Democratic support to make up for the shortfall in yes votes on his own side. Any deal in the House would have to be rubber-stamped by the Senate, which could take days under the rules governing the upper chamber, unless members agree unanimously to waive normal procedure.
The latest attempt to break through the impasse has been scheduled for a vote around 5:30 pm local time (2230 GMT) in the House, and would need two-thirds support rather than a simple majority under the chamber’s own fast-track rules. Patty Murray, the Democrats’ top senator on budget issues, said she would stay in Washington “through Christmas” to ensure that the add-ons in the original bipartisan funding plan were reinstated. Trump has been clear that he is willing to see a shutdown if he does not get his way. “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration,” he said on social media.
© 2024 AFP
