Congress moves toward funding government, averting shutdown

Congress is poised to pass stopgap legislation to avert a government shutdown, a rare bipartisan compromise on the eve of hotly contested midterm elections. The Senate is set to advance a continuing resolution — a bill to sustain government funding at current levels, often called a “CR” — on Thursday that would keep the government running through Dec. 16. The House will probably take up the measure Friday. Once Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) agreed to remove language from the legislation that would have overhauled federal rules for permitting large energy projects, the bill easily overcame a procedural vote in the evenly divided Senate on Tuesday, signaling a probable glide path to final passage. The legislation includes $12.4 billion in military and diplomatic assistance for Ukraine in its now seven-month-long war with Russia but does not include money the Biden administration requested for vaccines, testing and treatment for the coronavirus or monkeypox.

After Manchin’s concession Tuesday, the permitting language was dropped from the bill. All Republicans and some Democrats had opposed the measure, raising the prospect last week that a fight over the issue might have led to a government shutdown. “We’re going to work quickly and work fast to finish the process here in the Senate and send a CR to the House so they can send it to the president’s desk,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday. “With cooperation from our Republican colleagues, the Senate can finish his work as soon as [Thursday].” The federal government’s fiscal year ends Friday at midnight, and without a new law to fund the government, it would have had to shut down. That would have sidelined everything from federal services, such as anti-poverty food assistance and customer service functions at the Social Security Administration and IRS, to national parks, which would have closed. Some of the 2.1 million federal employees would have their paychecks deferred. The effects would also be damaging for an already fragile economy — and both parties’ chances at winning control of Congress in the November elections. Democrats and Republicans are staring down polling data that shows control of both chambers of Congress is essentially a toss-up. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters Wednesday that a GOP majority in the upper chamber was a “50-50 shot.”