The US Congress has approved an extension of the federal government’s budget, in a rare expression of a unified bipartisan position, preventing US administration institutions from being paralyzed as the holiday approaches.
After the session of the US House of Representatives, the Senate voted by 87 votes to 11 on an agreement to extend the budget until mid-January, while government funding was about to run out at midnight Friday-Saturday.
In the absence of ratification of the bill, 1.5 million government employees would have been deprived of their salaries, with air traffic disruptions expected, as well as national parks closed to visitors.
Most elected officials from both the Republican and democratic parties were unwilling to reach the “lockdown”, especially in the run-up to the holiday on November 23.
The divisions in Congress, between the Republicans who make up the majority in the House of Representatives and the Democrats who dominate the Senate, have reached such an extent that it has become impossible for lawmakers to vote on a budget for one year, unlike what most of the world’s economies do.
Instead, the United States should be content with a series of small budgets for a month or two. And every time one of these budgets ends, it again requires thorny negotiations that are widely followed on social networks, uttering threats, and then voting in the House of Representatives and in the Senate.
The last negotiations on the US Federal Budget, at the end of last September, plunged Congress into chaos.
