Will an agreement be reached three days before paralysis? The US Congress will vote on Tuesday to extend the federal budget in order to avoid another risk of a gridlock with devastating consequences.
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Two months after narrowly avoiding shutting down part of the country, the world’s leading economy is once again on the brink of collapse.
The state budget expires at midnight on the night of Friday to Saturday.
If nothing is done to extend it by that date, the country will suddenly slow down: 1.5 million civil servants will lose their salaries, air travel will be disrupted, and visitors to national parks will find their doors locked.
Most elected officials from both camps do not want this extremely unpopular situation, the famous “shutdown,” especially as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches.
Disagreements
At the end of the afternoon there will be a vote in the House of Representatives on a small extension of this budget. If it passes, it will then be up to the Senate to approve it in a timely manner.
Differences in Congress are so great that elected officials cannot currently vote on one-year budgets, unlike what most of the world’s economies do.
Instead, the United States will have to make do with a series of one- or two-month mini-budgets.
Acrimonious negotiations, detailed comments on social networks, threats, then a series of votes in the House of Representatives, in the Senate… Every time one of these budgets expires, everything has to be redone.
It is certainly common for last-minute agreements to be reached on these financial laws.
But the most recent negotiations over the American federal budget at the end of September plunged Congress into chaos.
Trumpist elected officials were furious that the then-Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives had reached a last-minute deal with the Democratic camp and fired him – a completely unprecedented situation.
Debt crisis in June
This time the agreement on the table provides for the budget to be extended for two different periods: one until mid-January and the other until the beginning of February.
New House Speaker Mike Johnson, unknown to the general public and with very limited experience on the Republican staff, is still trying to find his footing.
In any case, he will be forced, like his predecessor, to contend with a handful of Trumpists, adherents of very strict fiscal orthodoxy, and Democrats who refuse to let the former president’s lieutenants dictate the country’s economic policy.
These are the same conservative elected officials who brought the United States to the brink four months ago.
After long negotiations between the Biden government and the conservatives, the leading world power was able to prevent a default at the last minute.