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Reuters

Sep 27, 2023 9:27 am

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Updated 31 minutes ago

 

Capitolio – Shutdown (Photo: Reproduction)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The fourth partial shutdown of the U.S. government in a decade is four days away on Wednesday, with Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives preemptively rejecting a bipartisan bill advancing in the Senate that would fund US federal agencies until mid-November.

 

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be furloughed from their posts and a wide range of services, from reporting economic data to nutritional benefits, will be suspended if Congress fails to pass a proposal that Democratic President Joe Biden can sign into law by mid-terms. Saturday night.

 

The Senate voted overwhelmingly 77-19 on Tuesday to begin debate on a measure that would fund the government through Nov. 17, as well as authorize about $6 billion for domestic disaster responses and another $6 billion. of dollars in aid to Ukraine.

 

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Top Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected the Senate's temporary measure, saying any short-term funding measure passed by Congress with their support must address the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border.

 

“The Senate bill continues funding Biden’s open border plan. The country wants to resolve the open border issue. We need to solve the open border problem,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, the second-ranking Republican in the House.

 

But Republicans, who control the House by a narrow 221-212 margin, have not proposed their own measure to fully fund the government and are instead trying to pass a series of bills for the full fiscal year that begins in Sunday.

 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing threats from hardliners in his own party, who rejected a deal he negotiated with Biden in May for $1.59 trillion in discretionary spending in fiscal year 2024, demanding, instead, another $120 billion in cuts.

 

A small number of Republican hardliners have also threatened to strip McCarthy of his role as speaker of the House if he passes a spending bill that requires any Democratic vote to pass.

 

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McCarthy said House Republicans will likely introduce their own stopgap measure on Friday.

 

The impasse comes four months after Washington flirted with the possibility of defaulting on the country's more than $31 trillion in debt, a move that would have rattled financial markets around the world. A repeat of the political impasse has worried credit rating agencies, and Moody's warned this week that a shutdown could harm the country's creditworthiness.

 

Another downgrade of the US credit rating could further raise borrowing costs – and the country's debt.

 

(Reporting by Moira Warburton, Richard Cowan and David Morgan)