WASHINGTON — After two failed attempts to pass a bill to fund the U.S. government, the U.S. House passed a stopgap bill to fund the federal government through March.
The vote was 366 to 34, with one member voting present. All of the 34 votes against the bill were cast by Republicans.
House Republicans reached an agreement among themselves on a new proposal earlier Friday. After a lengthy meeting with Republican lawmakers, House Speaker Mike Johnson said they had agreed on a new proposal to fund the government.
“There is a unanimous agreement in the room that we need to move forward,” Johnson told reporters. “But I expect that we will be proceeding forward. We will not have a government shutdown.”
The last-ditch effort to avoid a government shutdown comes after Republicans in Congress failed on Thursday to pass a spending bill that was backed by President-elect Donald Trump. That bill would have raised the debt ceiling, which Trump had demanded at the last minute.
Dozens of Republicans voted against Thursday’s bill, and only two Democrats supported it.
Both chambers of Congress – the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate – must approve the measure in order to pass the bill and avoid a shutdown. President Joe Biden said Friday that he supports the bill and would sign it.
The new plan is the same bill as the one that failed on Thursday, except without the debt ceiling suspension, according to media reports. That means it will include a clean short-term extension of government funding, billions of dollars in disaster relief and billions more in aid to farmers.
Problems began for Johnson this week when he abandoned a bipartisan funding deal he had reached with Democrats after Trump and billionaire Elon Musk lambasted the plan.
Without a funding extension, government funding technically runs out at midnight Friday night. But most of the impact of the shutdown wouldn’t begin to take effect until Monday.
The White House on Friday echoed calls from Democratic lawmakers in urging Republicans to avoid a government shutdown.
In the event of a shutdown, many government workers will be furloughed, but those who provide essential services will continue to report to their jobs.
But none of those federal workers would be paid until Congress passes a new spending bill.
Active-duty members of the military and federal law enforcement are among those who would continue to work but would not be paid until Congress approved a new spending plan.
The threat of a shutdown comes right before Christmas. While about 59,000 of the Transportation Security Administration’s 62,000 workers are deemed essential and would continue to work without pay during a shutdown, the TSA said a shutdown would likely still cause delays at airports.
The longest U.S. government shutdown in history lasted 34 days from December 2018 until January 2019, when then-President Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that did not include several billion dollars for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. The ploy hurt his approval ratings.
Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
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