Congressional vote just after midnight: US avoids budget paralysis before Christmas

Joe Biden signed the decree adopting the budget this Saturday morning. MAXPPP – SAMUEL CORUM/POOL

Relief in the United States where the Christmas "shutdown" will ultimately not take place. The budget paralysis would have sent hundreds of thousands of civil servants home for the holidays without pay.

The Christmas “shutdown” will not take place: the United States narrowly avoided a budget paralysis on Saturday that would have sent hundreds of thousands of civil servants home for the holidays without pay.

Ending a tumultuous multi-day spat involving Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill that provides federal funding through mid-March, including more than $100 billion in aid for areas of the U.S. recently devastated by natural disasters.

The final Senate vote came shortly after the midnight deadline. Joe Biden then signed the text into law on Saturday morning, the White House announced.

“Good news for Americans”

The outgoing American president welcomed, in a press release, a “compromise” between Democrats and Republicans, thus avoiding a “shutdown”. “This is good news for Americans”before the end-of-year holidays, the Democrat continued.

A budgetary paralysis would have meant technical unemployment for hundreds of thousands of civil servants, the freezing of social assistance or even the closure of certain daycare centers. An extremely unpopular situation, all the more so just before Christmas.

Democrats and Republicans alike thought they had avoided any saga on Tuesday when the Republican president of the Republican House, Mike Johnson, announced that the two camps had reached a consensus on a budget text. But Elon Musk and then Donald Trump blew up the deal the next day.

Nipped in the bud

“Kill the text”, had urged the world's richest man to elected members of Congress on his social network X, denouncing spending that, according to him, is leading America to “bankruptcy” . The boss of SpaceX and Tesla, who has become an ally of Donald Trump, was followed a few hours later by the president-elect, who castigated a text “extraordinarily expensive “.

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Their opposition had nipped the bill in the bud and offered a foretaste of Donald Trump's second term, with an uncompromising style, even if it meant causing chaos, reminiscent of his first four years in the White House. But his return to power on January 20 will come with one major difference: the omnipresence at his side of Elon Musk, a controversial figure who has only grown in power in recent months.

“President Musk”

Many Democratic elected officials have denounced the growing influence of the multi-billionaire, to the point of ironizing about a “President Musk”, to whom Donald Trump would be reduced to the role of vassal.

Mainly responsible for the discussions, the “speaker” Mike Johnson was pressured on one side by the Democrats to return to the negotiated text, and on the other by certain conservative elected officials who rejected en bloc any text that did not include a budget cut to compensate for the new aid.

In view of the divisions on the right, the influential Republican elected official James Comer had warned on Thursday that for Congress to adopt a text, it would be necessary “obviously to have support on the democrat”.

“Bazaar”

The law passed Friday does not include raising the US debt ceiling, while Donald Trump had opposed the first text mainly for this reason. The president-elect had even made it a sine qua non condition for any new budget agreement, without which he would fight “to the end” against it.

Usually verbose on his Truth Social platform, he has remained silent on the new plan. As of Saturday noon, the Republican billionaire had not publicly commented on the adoption of the text.

Mike Johnson assured after the vote in the House that he had been in “constant contact” with Donald Trump and that he was “happy with the result”. The media outlet Semafor, however, reported that the future president was unhappy with the absence of a provision on the debt ceiling. Mike Johnson also said he had spoken with Elon Musk, who praised on X the “good job” of the “speaker” to renegotiate the budget text downwards.

A problem “that Biden must solve”

Each party had previously pointed the finger at the other to attribute responsibility for a possible paralysis. “This is a problem that Biden must solve,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday morning.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre had said earlier Friday that, on the contrary, it was up to the Republicans “to fix the mess they have created”.