A holiday shutdown? Republican and Democratic elected officials in the US Congress are working on Friday to quickly reach a new budget agreement that would avoid a paralysis of federal public services just before Christmas.
The clock is ticking, because at midnight local time (05:00 GMT Saturday), the federal state will find itself in an effective “shutdown” situation. The result: technical unemployment for hundreds of thousands of civil servants, the freezing of several social benefits and the closure of certain nurseries.
An extremely unpopular situation with Americans, especially as Christmas approaches.
However, Congress was well on its way to avoiding this situation on Tuesday when the Republican President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, announced that he had reached an agreement with the Democrats. This notably included more than 100 billion in aid to American regions recently devastated by natural disasters.
Alas, the negotiated agreement was torpedoed the next day by Elon Musk then Donald Trump.
The richest man in the world, who became an ally of the Republican billionaire, launched a virulent burst of posts on his social network X to express his opposition, urging elected officials to “kill the text”.
The president-elect followed suit in the evening and denounced a “ridiculous and extraordinarily onerous” text.
Issue
The twist took Congress by surprise and forced those responsible for the negotiations to start from scratch. He also gave a glimpse of a Trump 2.0 presidency even before the Republican took office on January 20. With a style – similar to his first mandate – not bothering with conventions, even if it means causing a certain chaos.
Elon Musk's resounding opposition also illustrated the growing influence of the boss of SpaceX and Tesla on major political decisions.
To the point, for some elected Democrats, of ironizing about a “President Musk”, to whom Donald Trump would be reduced to the role of vassal.
The way out of the impasse is now not obvious for Republican Mike Johnson, who welcomed the first agreement on Tuesday.
Mainly responsible for the negotiations, he is being pressured on the one hand by the Democrats to return to the text on which they had agreed, and on the other by certain conservative elected officials who are refusing outright any text which does not include a budget cut for compensate for the new aid.
In view of the divisions in the Republican camp and the voting rules, the influential Republican elected official James Comer warned on Thursday that for Congress to adopt a budgetary text, it would be necessary “obviously to have support on the Democratic side”.
“Not under Trump”
One of the possibilities mentioned to fend off the threat of a shutdown would be to split the main elements of the first text into several bills and on which elected officials would vote separately.
Exit, however – for the moment – the idea of raising the debt ceiling of the United States, while the absence of such a provision in the first text had been the main reason for the opposition of Donald Trump.
The elected president had even made it a sine qua non condition for any new text, otherwise he would fight “to the end” against it.
Each party is already pointing the finger at the other to attribute responsibility for a possible “shutdown”.
“If there is a government shutdown, let it start now, under Biden, but not under Trump,” Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Friday morning.
“This is a problem that Biden must solve, but if the Republicans can help (…) they will!”, he added.
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, on the contrary, maintained that it was the Republicans who had caused the agreement to “explode”.
“It’s up to Republicans in Congress to sort out the mess they’ve created,” she said during a press briefing.
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