The Republican Party unveiled on Saturday, November 11, an unconventional temporary plan to finance the American federal government, threatened in a few days with a possible budgetary paralysis – a shutdown.
The two-part plan is “necessary legislation to put House Republicans in the best possible position to defend conservative victories,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. “The bill will end the absurd holiday season tradition of introducing massive, jam-packed spending bills just before the Christmas holidays,” Johnson wrote on X (formerly Twitter ), without giving details.
US media have posited that under the unusual plan, some bills needed to keep federal services open would be passed through a short-term bill until January 19, 2024, while the rest would be postponed to February 2. This would buy Congress time to pass various spending bills, without committing funding to Israel, Ukraine and border security.
Some Republicans are already complaining that the plan doesn’t provide the funding cuts they seek. It is therefore not certain that the party, which only has a small majority in the House of Representatives, will be able to adopt it, and even less so the Senate, controlled by the Democrats.
A “recipe for more Republican chaos”
The White House called the proposal “a recipe for more Republican chaos and more shutdowns.” “Republicans in the House of Representatives are wasting valuable time with an unserious proposal that has been harshly criticized by members of both parties,” presidential spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
The federal state budget expires Friday evening at midnight. Without an agreement by then, the world’s largest economy will suddenly slow down – 1.5 million civil servants will be deprived of salaries and air traffic will be disrupted.
The latest negotiations around the American federal budget, at the end of September, had already plunged the institution into chaos. Trumpist elected officials, furious that the then Republican President of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, had reached a last-minute agreement with the Democratic camp, dismissed him – a completely unprecedented situation.
It then took three weeks for elected officials to agree on a new speaker, Mike Johnson. Three weeks during which the American Congress had not been able to adopt any law. This elected representative from Louisiana, unknown to the general public and with very limited experience within the Republican general staff, must deal, like his predecessor, with a handful of Trumpists, supporters of a very strict budgetary orthodoxy, and the Democrats, who refuse to have the country’s economic policy dictated to them by lieutenants of the former president.