The United States Congress on Saturday (Sunday in Manila) passed a last-minute funding measure to keep federal agencies operating for another 45 days and avert a costly government shutdown.

However, the deal did not include President Joe Biden's request for aid to war-torn Ukraine.

In a day of high-stakes brinksmanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate voted three hours before the midnight deadline to keep the lights on through mid-November with a resolution that had advanced from the House of Representatives earlier in the day.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed the last-ditch "continuing resolution" as millions of public employees were about to be sent home unpaid, jeopardizing military operations, food assistance and federal policymaking.

"Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans," Biden said in a statement.

Spending cuts

But he berated McCarthy and the House Republicans for reneging on spending levels agreed upon with the White House months ago — a major reason for the shutdown near-miss — and for stripping out support for Ukraine.

"I fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment," said the president, who signed the measure late Saturday, according to the White House.

The shutdown crisis was primarily precipitated by a small group of conservative Republicans who defied their own party's leadership by scuttling temporary funding proposals and insisting on deep spending cuts.

The group of 21 hardliners had threatened to oust McCarthy as speaker if a stopgap measure they opposed passed with Democratic support, and many Washington observers anticipated McCarthy would have to fight for his position in the coming weeks.

Lauren Boebert, a group member, declined to comment after the House vote on whether she and her colleagues would attempt to oust McCarthy, but she was plainly dissatisfied with the outcome.

"There are too many members here who are comfortable doing things the way they've been done since the mid-'90s," she told reporters. "And that's why we're sitting at $33 trillion in debt."

McCarthy sought to convey confidence about his own future and the prospects for securing a final agreement by the new mid-November deadline.

"In 45 days, we should get our work all done," he said while seeming to offer a hand to the hardliners, saying, "I welcome those 21 back in."

Arming and funding Kyiv in its war against the Russian invasion has been a key policy plank for the Biden administration, and, while the stopgap is temporary, it does raise questions over the political viability of renewing the multibillion-dollar flow of assistance.

No blank check

McCarthy said Russia's invasion was "horrendous" but insisted there could be "no blank check" for Ukraine.

"I have a real concern of what's going to happen long term, but I don't want to waste any money," he said.

With tensions running high as Democrats pored over the text of McCarthy's proposal, one of their lawmakers, Jamaal Bowman, triggered a fire alarm in a building housing congressional offices an hour before the House vote.

Bowman's spokesman insisted it was an accident, but Republicans accused him of trying to stall the investigation.

If Congress had failed to keep the government open, the shutdown would have begun shortly after midnight (0400 GMT Sunday) and would have resulted in pay delays for millions of federal employees and military personnel.

Most national parks, from the iconic Yosemite and Yellowstone in the west to Florida's Everglades swamp, would have closed on Sunday if there had been a shutdown.

The stopgap measure buys legislators time to negotiate full-year spending bills for the rest of fiscal 2024.

With AFP