The threat of a “shutdown” has been temporarily postponed.
The American Congress adopted a text on Thursday despite opposition from Trumpist elected officials, but this respite will once again only be short-lived.
The American House of Representatives, then the Senate in the evening, adopted a text on Thursday which postpones this budgetary paralysis of the federal state 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 promulgated by Democratic President Joe Biden, a formality.
It was his time in 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 the “shutdown”.
The list of potential consequences is long: unpaid air traffic controllers, shut down administrations, frozen food aid, unmaintained national parks... This is the fourth time since October that the deadline has been pushed back .
“Short term solution”
“It’s a short-term solution, not a long-term one,” Joe Biden said in a statement Thursday evening, nevertheless welcoming the approval of the text.
“Congress must do its job and pass annual budget laws that are useful to the American people,” he insisted.
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 that is still blocked: additional aid of $60 billion for Ukraine.
Because, in the midst 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, to the border with Mexico, where the former president and the current one went 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.