The countdown is on: the elected representatives of the American Congress will try by all means to adopt the federal budget finalized on Thursday before the end of the week and thus ward off the threat of a paralysis of the administration.
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Negotiators from the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate unveiled in the early hours of the day a text of 1,200 billion dollars, supposed to finance the American administration until the end of September.
This text must now be approved by both houses of the American Congress before Friday evening, to avoid a drying up of state finances.
Palestinian refugees, LGBT flags
This 1,012-page text, the result of very acrimonious negotiations, contains numerous diplomatic measures.
The text thus prohibits any direct funding from the United States to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
The agency has been at the center of controversy since Israel accused 12 of 30,000 employees of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack carried out by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Funds are also allocated to Taiwan.
The bill also contains several measures related to immigration, an explosive subject in the middle of the presidential campaign. It provides, among other things, for the hiring of numerous border police officers.
Finally, it contains a litany of measures, not necessarily linked to the budget.
Like the ban on American embassies from flying the rainbow flag, the standard of the LGBT community, contrary to what some of them were accustomed to doing.
A text adopted on March 9 had already made it possible to complete another part of the 2024 budget.
Partisan disputes
The United States has been struggling for several months over the final adoption of this budget, mired in partisan disputes, between the camp of Democratic President Joe Biden and certain Republicans, supporters of a very strict budgetary orthodoxy.
Congress has so far only been able to pass a series of mini-laws to extend the federal budget by a few days, or a few months at most.
As soon as one of these mini-budgets is about to expire, as one of them should be on Friday, there is a risk that the federal administration will be partially shut down, what the Americans call “shutdown”.
The list of potential consequences is long: unpaid air traffic controllers, shut down administrations, frozen food aid, unmaintained national parks…
This paralysis is extremely unpopular and a vote in the House could be organized as early as Friday morning to try to avert this threat.
