The federal paralysis, the famous “shutdown”, should still be avoided in the United States after a vote in the House of Representatives, where the main blocking point for Trumpist elected officials was, but the breathing space will not be new. only short-lived.
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The US House of Representatives passed a text on Thursday postponing that threat for a week in the middle of the election campaign, after an agreement was reached between elected Democrats and Republicans the day before.
He plans to extend the state budget by a week until March 8th and must thus avoid this paralysis that would have led to a temporary closure of many administrations and public services.
The text still needs to be voted on in the Senate, but this should be a formality. In fact, it was his entry into the House of Representatives that posed a problem.
Far-right Republican elected officials close to Donald Trump have so far blocked passage of the state's 2024 budget, the fiscal year of which began Oct. 1.
The world's largest economy is now implementing a series of mini-laws, each passed at the last minute, to extend the budget by a few days, weeks or months.
As soon as one of these mini-budgets expires, as one of them was supposed to do on Friday, there is a risk of a partial closure of the federal administration, what Americans call a “shutdown”.
The list of possible consequences is long: unpaid air traffic controllers, closed administrations, frozen food aid, unmaintained national parks…
Mini budgets
This is the fourth time the deadline has been pushed back since October.
Once the mini-budget has been passed by the House of Representatives and then the Senate, it must then be announced by President Joe Biden to avert the risk of paralysis in the state.
These profound disagreements, forcing Congress to take short-term action, illustrate the dysfunction within the American institutional apparatus.
It was these partisan disputes in the House of Representatives that even led to the dismissal of a Republican leader this fall.
President Joe Biden hosted Republican and Democratic leaders from both chambers of Congress at the White House on Tuesday to try to avoid this federal paralysis, but also to persuade Republicans to take another major measure that is still stalling is: additional aid of 60 billion dollars for Ukraine.
In the middle of the campaign for the presidential election in November, Donald Trump, who dreams of returning to the White House and is the absolute favorite for the Republican candidacy, is initially calling for immigration laws to be tightened.
The debate over this burning campaign issue also moved to the field on Thursday, to Texas, where the former and current presidents are traveling on the same day. The two men appear to be on track to face each other again in November's presidential election.
Donald Trump accuses Joe Biden of turning the US southern border into a sieve. He asserts that the democratic leader's asylum policies have caused an unprecedented migration crisis.