Keystone-SDA
Donald Trump expressed his opposition on Wednesday to a budget agreement negotiated in Congress between Republican and Democratic elected officials. His refusal further raises the specter of a paralysis of the federal state by the deadline of midnight Friday evening.
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December 18, 2024 – 11:26 p.m.
(Keystone-ATS) The president-elect and his future vice-president JD Vance spoke out in a joint statement against the text. They assert that any concession to Democrats represents “a betrayal of our country” and that Republicans must not be intimidated by the threat of this paralysis of the State, the “shutdown”.
“We should adopt a refined spending text that does not give (…) the Democrats everything they want,” argued the two future leaders, who will take office on January 20.
1500 page agreement
The Republican President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, presented on Tuesday this budget agreement of more than 1,500 pages, negotiated with the Democrats, which notably included more than 100 billion dollars in aid against natural disasters requested by Joe Biden, as well as $10 billion in aid to American farmers, but also an increase in the salaries of elected representatives of Congress.
The text would make it possible to finance the federal state until mid-March and thus avoid the “shutdown” before the fateful hour of Friday evening midnight.
Without this, the United States would therefore experience a paralysis of federal public services, with the result being technical unemployment for hundreds of thousands of civil servants, the freezing of several social benefits, or even the closure of certain daycare centers. An extremely unpopular situation, especially as Christmas approaches.
Opposition de Musk
But as soon as the agreement negotiated in Congress was published, Trumpist elected officials – supporters of a slimming down of the federal state – protested at what they considered to be irrational spending.
This is for example the case of Elon Musk, appointed by Donald Trump to head a commission to slash public spending, who attacked the text in a long series of posts on Wednesday on his social network X.
“Kill the text!” », Wrote the richest man in the world on several occasions. “Any elected official in the House or Senate who votes for this scandalous spending project deserves to lose their election in two years,” also said the boss of Tesla and SpaceX.
