After days of stalemate, Congress passed a stopgap funding bill Saturday to keep the government open through mid-November, narrowly avoiding a shutdown that could have had devastating impacts.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy secured broad Democratic support for the short-term bill while hardline members of his own party remained defiant. In the Senate, members of both parties also came together to move the bill to the desk of President Joe Biden, who signed the measure late Saturday.
The government will now continue operating until November 17. Lawmakers must pass another spending bill before then to avoid a shutdown. Here’s what you should know.
Nearly 2.2 million federal workers and 1.3 million active-duty troops will be spared an immediate impact on their finances after the possibility of a shutdown had threatened to leave them without pay.
The bill’s passage also at least temporarily avoids massive disruptions to air travel, as a shutdown could have led to significant delays. During the 2019 shutdown, hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers – who had to work without pay – called out sick.
The bill also includes a special measure to keep the Federal Aviation Administration operational. A shutdown, paired with the looming expiration of a key aviation law, would have resulted in millions of dollars in losses daily and left the agency scrambling to rebuild the air traffic control system.
The White House was able to get natural disaster funding into the stopgap bill, allowing relief efforts to continue in the wake of a recent brutal stretch of natural disasters.
Border policies will continue to be enforced as hardline Republicans were unable to get a border security amendment into the final bill.
The stopgap measure passed by Congress did not include additional funding for Ukraine…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply