Without this extension, 1.5 million civil servants would have been deprived of salary just before the holidays.
The American Congress approved, on Wednesday, November 16, an extension of the federal state budget, in a rare demonstration of unity between the parties, preventing the paralysis of the American administration. After the US House of Representatives on Tuesday, the Senate voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming majority of 87 votes to 11 an agreement to extend until mid-January the budget, which was due to expire at midnight, on the night of Friday to Saturday.
If this extension had not been adopted, 1.5 million civil servants would have lost their salaries, air traffic disrupted, while visitors to national parks would have found their doors closed. Most elected officials from both camps did not want this extremely unpopular situation, the famous “shutdown”, especially in the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday on November 23.
Endless negotiations
The dissensions in Congress (between Republicans in the majority in the House and Democrats in control in the Senate) are such that elected officials are currently unable to vote on one-year budgets, contrary to what most of the world’s economies do. Instead, the United States must settle for a series of one- or two-month mini-budgets.
Each time one of these budgets expires, everything has to be done again: acrimonious negotiations, commented on extensively on social networks, threats, then a series of votes, in the Chamber, in the Senate… The latest negotiations around of the US federal budget at the end of September had plunged Congress into chaos.
Trumpist elected officials, furious that the then Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, had reached a last-minute agreement with the Democratic camp, dismissed him on October 3, an unprecedented situation.