Congressional officials received by Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House on February 27, 2024 (AFP/Jim WATSON)
The paralysis of the federal state, the famous “shutdown”, should still be avoided in the United States, after a vote in the House of Representatives where the main blocking point for Trumpist elected officials was located, but the respite will not be new, only short-lived.
The American House of Representatives adopted a text on Thursday which postpones this threat for a week, in the middle of the electoral campaign, after an agreement reached the day before between elected Democrats and Republicans.
He plans to extend the federal state budget by one week, until March 8, and must thus avoid this paralysis which would have led to a temporary closure of many administrations and public services.
The text must still be voted on in the Senate, but this should be a formality. It was in fact his passage to the House of Representatives that posed a problem.
Elected officials from the most right-wing fringe of Republicans, close to Donald Trump, have so far prevented the adoption of the 2024 federal state budget, the fiscal year of which began on October 1.
The world’s largest economy therefore now operates through a series of mini-laws, each time adopted at the last minute, to extend the budget by a few days, weeks or months.
As soon as one of these mini-budgets is about to expire, as was to be the case for one of them on Friday, the risk arises that the federal administration will be partially shut down, what the Americans call “shutdown”.
The list of potential consequences is long: unpaid air traffic controllers, shut down administrations, frozen food aid, unmaintained national parks…
– Mini-budgets –
This is the fourth time since October that the deadline has been postponed.
The mini-budget, once adopted by the House of Representatives then by the Senate, will then have to be promulgated by President Joe Biden to repel the threat of paralysis of the federal state.
These deep disagreements, which force Congress to operate in the short term, illustrate the dysfunctions within the American institutional apparatus.
It was these partisan quarrels in the House of Representatives that even led to the dismissal of a Republican leader in the fall.
President Joe Biden received Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress at the White House on Tuesday, to try to avoid this paralysis of the federal state, but also to convince the Republicans to adopt another major measure still blocked: additional aid of $60 billion for Ukraine.
Because, in the middle of the electoral campaign for the presidential election in November, Donald Trump, who dreams of returning to the White House and is the ultra-favorite to be the Republican candidate, is first calling for a toughening of immigration legislation .
The debate on this burning theme for the campaign also moved on Thursday to the field, to Texas, where the former president and the current one are going on the same day. The two men seem well on their way to facing each other again during the presidential election in November.
Donald Trump accuses Joe Biden of having transformed the southern border of the United States into a sieve. He assures that the Democratic leader’s asylum policy has caused an unprecedented migration crisis.
© 2024 AFP
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