The United States’ Congress has passed a temporary funding bill to keep the federal government running until mid-November and avert a costly government shutdown by leaving out aid to war-torn Ukraine requested by President Joe Biden.
The House of Representatives voted 335-91 late on Saturday to fund the government for a further 45 days, with 209 Democrats supporting the measure compared with 126 Republicans.
The Democratic-majority Senate then voted 88-9 in favour of the measure just three hours before the midnight Saturday deadline to avoid what would have been the federal government’s fourth partial shutdown in a decade.
The move marked a profound shift from earlier in the week when a shutdown, which would have forced the closure of a range of public services and that leave most of the government’s 4 million employees unpaid, looked all but inevitable.
The vote will ensure the government is funded until November 17, and also increases federal disaster assistance by $16 billion.
“Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans,” Biden said in a statement.
Source from www.aljazeera.com
