Musk denounces ‘outrageous spending plan’
Before that, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, had already attacked the agreement in a long series of posts on Wednesday on his social network X.
“Kill the text!”, wrote several times the billionaire who campaigned alongside Donald Trump and was appointed by the latter to head a commission to slash public spending. “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.
$100 billion in natural disaster aid in deal
For the Biden administration, a lack of budget agreement risks “harming hard-working Americans” and “creating instability”. “Republicans should stop playing political games,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The Republican President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, presented this budget agreement of more than 1,500 pages on Tuesday. Negotiated with the Democrats, it included, among other things, more than $100 billion in aid against natural disasters requested by Joe Biden.
The text made it possible to finance the federal state until mid-March and thus avoid the “shutdown” before the fateful hour of midnight on the night of Friday to Saturday. Without this, the United States would experience a paralysis of federal public services, resulting in technical unemployment for hundreds of thousands of civil servants, the freezing of several social benefits and even the closure of certain daycare centers. An extremely unpopular situation, especially as Christmas approaches.
Elon Musk’s influence castigated
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 bill represents “a Christmas gift to the left,” said elected official Russell Fry.
The leader of the Democrats in the lower house, Hakeem Jeffries, declared that with this opposition from Donald Trump, the elected Republicans had “received the order to paralyze the State” and “to make the American workers suffer that they claim sustain”.
Other Democrats denounced Elon Musk’s influence on the president-elect’s decision. “Tonight, Donald Trump and elected Republican officials have bowed their heads to the real president-elect, Elon Musk,” criticized New York elected official Nydia Velazquez.
Trump calls for debt ceiling to be raised
The next steps to avoid a “shutdown” are now uncertain. For some Trumpist elected officials, a new bill providing for much less spending should be quickly presented to Congress, a solution to which the president-elect adheres, but not unconditionally. On Truth Social, Donald Trump assured that such a text would be of no use if it was not accompanied by an increase in the debt ceiling.
The United States has the particularity of regularly coming up against a legal constraint concerning its credit capacity: this debt ceiling, or their maximum amount of debt, which must be formally raised or suspended by Congress.
A suspension decided in 2023 expires at the beginning of January and the United States should reach the ceiling in June. Donald Trump therefore declared on Wednesday that upon his return to power he wanted to avoid this “guillotine”, “a vicious trap” set up according to him last year by the Democrats.
Without an increase or a new suspension of the ceiling, “I will fight to the end,” wrote Donald Trump, saying he wanted everything to be resolved before January 20.
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