US govt shutdown looms as Trump, Musk kill funding deal

The United States was staring down the barrel of a holiday-period government shutdown Thursday as a late-hour intervention by Donald Trump and Elon Musk threatened efforts in Congress to keep the lights on through the New Year.

The money authorized by lawmakers to run federal agencies is set to expire Friday night, and party leaders had agreed on a stopgap bill -- known as a "continuing resolution" (CR) -- to keep operations functioning.

Debt hawks in the House of Representatives balked at what they considered an overstuffed package full of "pork" -- spending that has nothing to do with the point of the bill -- but it still looked like it might pass a floor vote.

Then Musk, the world's richest man and President-elect Trump's incoming "efficiency czar," bombarded his 208 million followers on X with posts trashing the text, many of them making false or misleading claims.

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Twelve hours after his first tweet, Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance effectively torpedoed the bill, releasing a statement attacking the add-ons and demanding out of the blue that it include an increase in the country's debt limit.

Negotiating increases in permitted federal borrowing levels -- and then writing and voting on legislation in both chambers on Congress -- usually takes weeks, and government functions are due to begin winding up at midnight going into Saturday.

The debacle offered a preview of the chaos that Democrats say will attend Trump's second term in office, and prompted questions over why a tech billionaire who is a private, unelected citizen was able to plunge Congress into crisis.

"It's weird to think that Elon Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter," prominent conservative lawyer and Trump critic George Conway posted.

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As a shutdown inched closer, House Republicans and Democrats gathered in fraught meetings to begin the seemingly impossible task of coming up with a Plan B with just hours to spare.

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Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was being criticized from all sides for having misjudged his own members' tolerance for the bill's spiraling costs, and for allowing himself to have been blindsided by Musk and Trump.

He is expected to introduce a slimmed-down funding patch, attaching a borrowing limit and removing most of the add-ons.

But Democrats, who control the Senate, have little political incentive to help Republicans and say they will only vote for the agreed package, meaning Trump's party will have to go it alone.

This is something the fractious, divided party -- which can afford to lose only a handful of members in any House vote -- has not managed in any major bill in this Congress.

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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries berated Johnson for reneging on the cross-party agreement while the White House hit out at Trump, urging Republicans to "stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement."

The trouble with the bill began during the negotiations, as Republican leaders demanded billions of dollars in economic aid to farmers, prompting Democrats to start making their own requests.

While voicing frustration over the spiraling costs, Trump's main objection was that Congress was leaving him to handle a debt-limit increase -- invariably a contentious, time-consuming fight -- rather than including it in the text.

He said Wednesday that "everything should be done, and fully negotiated" before he takes office.

But conservatives are generally against increasing the country's massive borrowing -- currently standing at $36.2 trillion -- and multiple Republicans have never voted for a hike.

The Biden administration estimates that the debt limit won't actually be reached until the summer of 2025 and Republicans had been planning to handle an extension as part of other legislation.

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The disarray jeopardizes $100 billion in disaster relief in the bill to help Americans hit by two devastating hurricanes in the fall, as well as $30 billion in aid for farmers.

A shutdown would cause the closure of federal agencies and national parks, limiting public services and furloughing potentially hundreds of thousands of workers without pay over Christmas.

Source: AFP