US Congress prevents government shutdown with budget law

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional leaders announced an agreement Sunday on a short-term spending bill that would fund federal agencies for about three months, averting a possible partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1 and delaying final decisions until after the November election.

Temporary budget laws usually keep agencies funded at their current levels. However, following the two assassination attempts on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, an additional $231 million was made available to strengthen the Secret Service. Additional funds were also made available to support the presidential transition, among other things.

The legislator has fought to get to this point, as the current fiscal year ends at the end of the month. At the urging of the most conservative members of his party, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) had tied the temporary funding to a provision that would have required states to require proof of citizenship when registering voters.

But Johnson abandoned this approach in order to reach an agreement, even though Trump insisted that there should be no interim solution without compulsory voting.

Shortly thereafter, serious negotiations between the parties began, and leadership agreed to extend funding through mid-December, giving the current Congress the opportunity to draft a full-year budget proposal after the November 5 election, rather than passing that responsibility on to the next Congress and president.

In a letter to his Republican colleagues, Johnson said the budget proposal would be “very narrow and limited to the bare minimum” and would “include only those expansions that are absolutely necessary.”

“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most sensible course of action in the current circumstances,” Johnson wrote. “As history teaches and recent polls confirm, it would be an act of political malpractice to shut down the government less than 40 days before a fateful election.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would review the bill in its entirety before voting this week, but with the agreement, “Congress is now on a bipartisan path to avoid a government shutdown that would harm ordinary Americans.”

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Tom Cole, said on Friday that the talks were going well.

“Nothing has happened so far that we can't handle,” said Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “Most people don't want a government shutdown and they don't want it to affect the election. So nobody is saying, 'I have to have this or we're leaving.' It's just not like that.”

Johnson's earlier attempt failed in the Democratic-dominated Senate and faced opposition in the White House, but it did provide the speaker with an opportunity to show Trump and the conservatives on his caucus that he was fighting for their cause.

The end result—government funding virtually on autopilot—was exactly what many had predicted. With just weeks to go before the election, few lawmakers in either party had any appetite for the risk-taking politics that often lead to a shutdown.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the same agreement could have been reached two weeks ago, but “Speaker Johnson chose the MAGA route and wasted valuable time.”

“As I have said throughout this process, there is only one way to get things done: with bipartisan, bicameral support,” Schumer said.

Now, a bipartisan majority is expected to pass the short-term measure this week. But agreement on the short-term measure does not mean it will be easy to pass a final budget bill in December. The election outcome could also affect political calculations if one party fares significantly better than the other, potentially pushing the fight back to early next year.

However, the Secret Service's funding is conditional: lawmakers have made it contingent on the Department of Homeland Security providing certain information to a House task force and a Senate committee investigating the assassination attempts against Trump.

In a recent letter, the Secret Service told lawmakers that a funding deficit was not the reason for Trump’s security lapses when a shooter climbed onto an unsecured roof on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and opened fire. But acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. said this week that the agency had an “immediate need” and that he was talking to Congress.