Donald Trump expressed his opposition on Wednesday to a budget agreement negotiated in the American Congress between Republican and Democratic elected officials, thus further raising the specter of a paralysis of the federal state at the deadline of midnight Friday evening.
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The president-elect and his future vice-president JD Vance spoke out in a joint statement against the text, saying that any concession to Democrats represented “a betrayal of our country” and that Republicans should not be intimidated by the threat of this paralysis of the State, the famous “shutdown”.
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 made 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 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.
A situation which is therefore extremely unpopular, especially as Christmas approaches.
“Kill the text”
As soon as the agreement negotiated in Congress was published, Trumpist elected officials – supporters of a slimming down of the federal state – however, rebelled against what they considered to be irrational spending.
Elon Musk, ally of Donald Trump and appointed by the latter to head a commission to slash public spending, also 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.
Before the press release from Donald Trump and JD Vance, Mike Johnson defended the agreement.
By passing this text, “we are making a clean slate and we are putting in place the conditions for Trump to come roaring back with his ‘America First’ program,” the elected Republican told Fox News.
The next steps are now uncertain in Congress.
” Consequences “
“Republicans in the House of Representatives have been ordered to shut down the state. And to make the American workers they claim to support suffer,” said the leader of the Democrats in the lower house, Hakeem Jeffries, on Wednesday evening.
“You break the agreement between the two parties, you assume the consequences that follow,” he launched as a warning.
For certain Trumpist elected officials, a new text, including much fewer provisions and therefore expenses should be presented to Congress, to both avoid the “shutdown”, but also to start again on a limited budgetary basis before Donald Trump’s return to office. White House on January 20.
A solution to which the president-elect and his next vice-president adhere.
“We should adopt a refined spending text that does not give (…) the Democrats everything they want,” argued the two future leaders in their press release.
The Republicans will regain the majority in the Senate at the beginning of January when the newly elected officials are sworn in.
They will then have control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and will endeavor to quickly adopt laws financing Donald Trump’s program, particularly in terms of the expulsion of migrants, oil exploitation, and the reduction of taxes.
