WASHINGTON: US lawmakers raced on Friday to prevent a government shutdown due to bite within hours, after president-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk sabotaged a bipartisan agreement that would have kept the lights on well beyond Christmas.
With government funding running out at Friday midnight, the Republican-led House of Representatives needs to come up with a short-term fix to replace a funding package that looked like a done deal before Trump’s intervention.
If no agreement is struck, federal agencies, national parks and other services will begin shuttering on Saturday as the government prepares to send up to 875,000 workers home for the holidays without pay.
“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden administration,” Trump said on social media, seeking to avoid blame for the chaos.
“This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”
The race against the clock comes after a week of drama in Washington that began with Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson releasing a mammoth funding bill stuffed with unrelated measures that ballooned its cost.
Conservatives immediately voiced anger over the add-ons in the 1,547-page text, while Musk, Trump’s incoming point man on government spending cuts, led a campaign bashing the deal.
Trump dealt the fatal blow by demanding the deal be renegotiated to strip away much of the extraneous spending and to attach text suspending the country’s self-imposed borrowing cap for two years.
The new demand — aimed at freeing up Trump from debt negotiations — caught Republicans off guard and they spent Thursday scrambling to write a new, pared-back package that could keep fiscal conservatives, Trump, Musk and Democrats happy.
It proved an impossible task, with Democrats feeling betrayed over the collapse of the bipartisan agreement and dozens of Republicans rebelling against their own leadership.
Trump turmoil returns
“For decades, the Republican Party has lectured America about fiscal responsibility, about the debt and the deficit. It’s always been phony,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on the House floor.
Vice president-elect J.D. Vance blamed Democrats, arguing that they had “voted to shut down the government” in a bid to thwart Trump’s agenda _ even though the Republicans are in the majority.
The failed vote marked the first major defeat for Trump a month before he enters office, as he and Musk had both thrown their weight behind the revised plan.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has already begun contacting agencies about a potential shutdown, and Republicans have offered no clear path for getting a new bill through the House.
Funding the government is always fraught and lawmakers are under pressure this time around because they failed to agree on full-year budgets for 2025, despite months of negotiations.
Speaker Johnson has been facing criticism from all sides and his job looks under threat when he stands for reelection in January.
The Louisiana congressman was blamed for misjudging his own members’ tolerance for the original funding patch’s spiraling costs, and for being blindsided by Musk and Trump.
Published in Dawn, December 21st, 2024
