US Senate seals budget deal with more spending on defence, infrastructure, pharma
The US Senate approved a two-year budget deal early on Friday, with a bill focusing on boosting military and domestic spending by almost $300bn over the next two years.
The second shutdown of the year started at midnight and US Office of Personnel Management has already advised millions of workers to check whether they ought to report to work on Friday or not.
Nevertheless the shutdown has been brief, it all depended on how quickly the House of Representatives took a vote on the approved bill. Although many House and Senate Republican leaders assured that the bill would be approved quickly, though despite a midnight deadline the negotiations went on until 2am and so caused the shutdown.
The package from the Senate has been approved just after 2230 GMT which means the shutdown will hold no consequences. If the vote would have been delayed further there would have been a full-blown shutdown, the second in 2018. The budget package will keep federal agencies open until 23 March, in which time groups in the House and Senate plan to craft a massive $1.3trn 'omnibus' spending bill to will fund federal agencies until the end of September.
The government already experienced a three-day shutdown in January when Democrats blocked the budget bill to try and force concessions on immigration and the ‘Dreamers’ situation.
BUDGET PACKAGE: DEFENCE, INFRASTRUCTURE, DISASTER RELIEF, DRUG ABUSE
The budget bill will not replace the DACA programme which protected the immigrant children known as ‘Dreamers’. Although the president has been adamant on eliminating the initiative and creating a new more restricting immigrant plan.
The bill focuses on raising military and domestic spending caps by almost $300bn over the next two years. Taking into account the recent tax overhaul led by President Trump, this extra military financing would come by increasing the debt ceiling. The bill also includes full funding for the Pentagon, and a temporary funding plan for the rest of the federal government.
Roughly $160bn of the budget will be allocated go to the Pentagon, about $128bn to non-defence program, with more than $80bn in post-hurricane relief for Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul blocked the vote in the Senate until after midnight because he doesn’t “advocate for shutting the government down, but neither for keeping it open, and borrowing a million dollars a minute,” he said on the floor. The Senator warned that the plan would create huge amounts of new deficit spending.
He also accused his fellow Republicans of hypocrisy for defending the increase in spending and Republican deficits that could lead to $1trn in debt and not Obama’s deficits in the past.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi had urged colleagues to oppose the bill over the Republicans' failure to resolve Dreamers programme, but her efforts fell short as 73 backed the deal.
Fellow opposition leader Chuck Schumer tried to focus on the positives. “What makes Democrats proudest of this bill is that after a decade of cuts to programs that help the middle class, we have a dramatic reversal," he said. "Funding for education, infrastructure, fighting drug abuse, and medical research will all, for the first time in years, get very significant increases, and we have placed Washington on a path to deliver more help to the middle class in the future.”