US Senate passes stop-gap funding bill to avert government shutdown

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The US Senate on Friday evening passed a bill to avert a government shutdown after a handful of Democrats abandoned their resistance to the Republican-backed measure.

The Senate voted 54-46 to keep funding the government, just hours before a shutdown would have started.

Republican senator Rand Paul voted against the measure, while Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and independent Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats, helped pass it.

In an earlier crucial procedural vote, some Democrats helped Republicans push through the measure, which will fund the federal government through to September 30. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, along with eight other Democrats and King sided with Republicans in bringing the so-called continuing resolution to a final vote.

Republicans control the Senate, but required a “supermajority” to approve the procedural vote, which overcame a potential filibuster. The bill now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk for signing.

The final vote caps a week of tense talks among Democrats, who struggled to unify behind a strategy for negotiating with Republicans. Though they control both chambers of Congress, Republicans lack a supermajority and needed help from across the aisle to bring the bill to a vote.

The Republican bill includes provisions Democrats are unhappy with. Some Democratic lawmakers expressed concerns that it hands Trump too much room to enact his agenda over the next six months. Still, Democrats did not want to be blamed for a government shutdown, which the president and Republicans made clear they would do.

Schumer had initially pushed back strongly against the stop-gap bill but reversed his stance and helped to convince others in his caucus to vote in favour of the measure.

There was a risk that Trump and close adviser Elon Musk would use a shutdown as an executive power grab, Schumer argued, noting that Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) could speed up their cost-cutting frenzy with fewer checks on their power.

Trump praised Schumer for supporting the bill: “I appreciate Senator Schumer, and I think he did the right thing, really. I’m very impressed by that,” the president told reporters as he boarded Air Force One just before the final vote concluded.

Schumer’s support for the bill paved the way for other Senate Democrats to follow suit.

After the procedural vote, senator Dick Durbin, a senior Democrat, said “the last thing we need to do is plunge our country into further chaos and turmoil by shutting down the government” while Trump and Musk are “taking a chainsaw to the federal government’s workforce and illegally freezing federal funding”.

Shaheen said it would be “playing into Republicans’ hand” with a shutdown would give Musk and Trump “unchecked power to continue dismantling the federal government.

However, Schumer was criticised by some in the party for doing so, particularly in the House.

Ahead of the vote on Friday, Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, said his caucus was “strongly opposed to the partisan Republican spending bill”, saying Trump and Musk presented a “false choice” between the stop-gap and a government shutdown. But Jeffries declined to say whether he had lost confidence in Schumer.

Democrat representative Nancy Pelosi, former House Speaker, also took a swipe at Schumer before the vote. “Let’s be clear: neither is a good option for the American people. But this false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable.”

Progressive Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Thursday that “I hope Senate Democrats understand there is nothing clever about” their move. “Those games won’t fool anyone.”