The American Congress, in Washington, January 23, 2019 (AFP/Archives/Jim WATSON)
The countdown is on: the elected representatives of the American Congress will try by all means to adopt the federal budget finalized on Thursday before the end of the week and thus ward off the threat of a paralysis of the administration.
Negotiators from the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate unveiled in the early hours of the day a text of 1,200 billion dollars, supposed to finance the American administration until the end of September.
This text must now be approved by both houses of the American Congress before Friday evening, to avoid a sudden drying up of state finances.
– Partisan quarrels –
A vote in the House must be organized on Friday morning to try to repel this threat. But the timing is more vague in the Senate, fueling speculation about the possibility of a paralysis, even very temporary, of the federal state, the famous “shutdown”.
The list of potential consequences is long: unpaid air traffic controllers, shut down administrations, frozen food aid, unmaintained national parks…
This paralysis is extremely unpopular with Americans.
But the United States has been struggling for several months over the final adoption of a budget, entangled in partisan quarrels, between the camp of Democratic President Joe Biden and certain Republicans, supporters of a very strict budgetary orthodoxy.
Congress has so far only been able to adopt a series of mini-laws to extend the federal budget by a few days, or a few months at most.
As soon as one of these mini-budgets is about to expire, as one of them should be on Friday, there is a risk that the federal administration will be partially shut down.
– Palestinian refugees, LGBT flags –
If passed, the bill presented Thursday would extend the US budget until the end of the fiscal year, September 30.
This 1,012-page text, the result of very acrimonious negotiations, contains numerous diplomatic measures.
The text thus prohibits any direct funding from the United States to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
The agency has been at the center of controversy since Israel accused 12 of its 30,000 employees of involvement in the October 7 attack carried out by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Funds are also allocated to Taiwan.
The bill also contains several measures related to immigration, an explosive subject in the middle of the presidential campaign. It provides, among other things, for the hiring of numerous border police officers.
Finally, it contains a litany of measures, not necessarily linked to the budget.
Like the ban on American embassies from flying the rainbow flag, the standard of the LGBT+ community, contrary to what some of them were accustomed to doing during “Pride Month”.
A text adopted on March 9 had already made it possible to complete another part of the 2024 budget.
© 2024 AFP
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