On Wednesday evening, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) announced that Democrats and Republicans in the Senate had reached a deal to avert a government shutdown this week.
On Monday, Republicans blocked efforts to fund the government beyond the midnight deadline on Friday morning. Without a continuing resolution to produce more funds, there was the possibility of a government shutdown, which would have resulted in the sudden halting of a number of federal services for an indeterminate amount of time.
Schumer announced that Republicans had agreed not to block a new vote on the measure, set to come sometime midday on Thursday — hours before the deadline would have been reached.
“We have an agreement on the CR — the continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown — and we should be voting on that tomorrow morning,” Schumer said on Wednesday night.
The resolution is set to keep the government open through at least December 3. It will include funding for emergency services, such as disaster relief, as well as funding for the resettlement of Afghan refugees.
Upon passage, the bill will likely be voted upon and passed in the House of Representatives later that day, and signed into law by President Joe Biden.
The agreement on the continuing resolution is a significant development, as it will avert a crisis that would have started this week. One analysis found that as many as 6 million jobs could have been lost if government funding wasn’t continued on Thursday.
Although the measure addresses how the government will be funded for the next two months, it does not resolve the raising of the debt ceiling. The U.S. is set to default on its debt obligations around October 18 if nothing changes in the immediate future, a situation that could come with serious economic repercussions.
Defaulting on the debt could mean the U.S.’s ability to borrow money will be negatively impacted. In 2011, the mere possibility of default led to the nation’s credit rating being downgraded by Standard & Poor’s for the first time in 70 years.
Failing to adjust the debt ceiling wouldn’t just affect the government’s credit rating — it would also have rippling effects on the rest of the country, and could cause a recession that would damage an already weakened economy.
“It would only take a couple of months of missing federal payments due to the debt ceiling to mechanically send the economy into recession — and that’s without assessing damage it would cause from financial market fallouts,” an assessment from the Economic Policy Institute warned.
Some lawmakers believe that Congress should no longer have the responsibility of managing fiscal crises. On Thursday morning, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pennsylvania) tweeted that legislation he proposed with Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Kentucky) could ensure that debt limits would never be a political issue to be debated on again.
This artificial crisis is COMPLETELY avoidable,” Boyle tweeted. “The Debt Ceiling Reform Act that @RepJohnYarmuth and I introduced [Wednesday] would fix this problem.”
According to a press release from Boyle, the proposed bill “would eliminate the debt limit as we now know it” and would transfer the authority to raise the debt ceiling to the Treasury Department.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.