USA At the last moment: US government shutdown averted
The US Congress has averted an impending government shutdown at the last moment. After the House of Representatives, the Senate passed an interim budget in a late-night session shortly after a deadline had expired, thus preventing a prolonged government shutdown. This ended days of dithering that President-elect Donald Trump and his confidant, tech billionaire Elon Musk, had triggered with a political blockade maneuver.
21.12.2024, 07:41
SDA
US President Joe Biden still has to sign the budget bill in order for it to come into force - but this is considered a formality and, according to the White House, should happen during the course of Saturday. The vote in the Senate did not begin until shortly after midnight - just after the deadline by which a budget had to be submitted. From a purely technical point of view, this briefly triggered a "shutdown" mode. However, this has no real effect due to the minimal duration. The White House announced that ministries and authorities could continue their normal operations and would not be paralyzed.
Forced renegotiations in parliament
Without the budget agreement, this would have happened because the federal government would not have had any fresh money at its disposal. As a result, some state institutions would have had to stop working and many state employees would not have received a salary for the time being - and this would have happened around Christmas of all times. Republicans and Democrats in Congress therefore struggled intensively to find a solution.
The last-minute agreement followed days of turmoil in parliament after Trump - driven by Musk - had unceremoniously torpedoed a previous budget agreement. Trump forced renegotiations of the draft budget towards a significantly slimmed-down version. In the end, he was not able to push through one of his core demands. Nevertheless, the blockade action by Trump and Musk was a special kind of political maneuver that caused quite a stir.
The shadow president
Democrats are particularly bothered by the fact that a billionaire without any political mandate and with his own economic interests is intervening significantly in the fate of parliament. Various Democratic members of Congress mocked the fact that Musk - the richest man in the world - was the one calling the shots for the Republicans, not Trump. They smugly referred to the Tesla boss as "President Musk". The 53-year-old had supported Trump's campaign with a lot of money during the election campaign and has hardly left the Republican's side since his election victory.
Musk celebrated the agreement on a revised transition budget on his Platform X as a victory for public opinion. "Vox populi, vox dei" (the people's voice (is) God's voice), he wrote there - a Latin phrase that the billionaire often uses.
The battle over the debt ceiling
Among other things, Trump - seconded by Musk - had tried to include a topic that was not actually planned in the budget negotiations and to achieve a suspension of the debt ceiling for several years. The limit stipulates the maximum amount of government debt that can be increased in order to finance current expenditure such as salaries, social benefits, defense spending and interest on existing debt. If the ceiling is reached and not increased, the US government may not take on any new debt. The discussion about the debt ceiling regularly leads to conflicts between Republicans and Democrats, as it is often used as a pressure tool for other political goals.
Trump will be sworn in as president on January 20 and had probably hoped to give himself some leeway in office by raising the debt ceiling early. He has now failed to achieve this in the current budget negotiations. Although an interim draft bill had provided for a regulation in line with his wishes, it had met with resistance from the Democrats and some Republicans and therefore failed to gain a majority.
The Republican chairman of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, said that he had spoken to Musk and Trump shortly before the final draft was voted on in his chamber and had discussed the procedure with them. The Democratic minority leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, in turn argued that his group had ensured that the "billionaires' club" did not ultimately prevail with its demand for a suspension of the debt ceiling.
The last-minute pattern
The passing of the budget regularly leads to fierce wrangling in the USA. Parliament repeatedly only agrees on a draft at the very last moment - usually shuffling from one transitional budget to the next. This is also the case now: The budget that has now been passed will only last until mid-March. Then the tug-of-war in parliament is likely to start all over again.
