Congress races to find bill to keep government open
The US Congress on Thursday aimed to end a dispute over border security with legislation that would ignore President Donald Trump’s request for $5.7bn to help build a wall on the USMexico border but avoid a partial government shutdown.
Late on Wednesday, negotiators put the finishing touches on legislation to fund the department of homeland security to September 30, the end of the fiscal year, along with a range of other federal agencies.
Racing against a Friday midnight deadline, when operating funds expire for the agencies that employ about 800,000 workers at the departments of homeland security, agriculture, commerce, justice and others, the Senate and House of Representatives aimed to pass the legislation later on Thursday.
That would give Trump time to review the measure and sign it into law before temporary funding for about a quarter of the government expires.
Failure to do so would shutter many government programmes, from national parks maintenance and air traffic controller training programmes to the collection and publication of data for financial markets, for the second time this year.
“This agreement denies funding for President Trump’s border wall and includes several key measures to make our immigration system more humane,” House appropriations committee chair Nita Lowey, a Democrat, said in a statement.
According to congressional aides, the final version of the legislation would give the Trump administration $1.37bn in new money to help build 88.5km of physical barriers on the southwest border, far less than what Trump had been demanding.
It is the same level of funding Congress appropriated for border security measures in 2018, including barriers but not concrete walls.
Since he ran for office in 2016, Trump has been demanding billions of dollars to build a wall on the southwest border, saying “crisis” conditions required a quick response to stop the flow of illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants, largely from Central America.
He originally said Mexico would pay for a 3,200km-long concrete wall an idea Mexico dismissed.
Trump has not yet said whether he would sign the legislation into law if the Democratcontrolled House of Representatives and Republican-led Senate approve it, even as many of his fellow Republicans in Congress were urging him to do so.
Instead, he said on Wednesday he would hold off on a decision until he examines the final version of the legislation.
But Trump, widely blamed for a five-week shutdown that ended in January, said he did not want to see federal agencies close again because of fighting over funds for the wall.
Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican negotiator who is chair of the Senate appropriations committee, said in a Twitter post he spoke to Trump on Wednesday and he was in good spirits. Shelby told Trump the agreement was “a downpayment on his border wall”. Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who is in regular contact with the White House, said Trump was “inclined to take the deal and move on”.
But Graham also told reporters that Trump would then look elsewhere to find more money to build a border wall and was “very inclined” to declare a national emergency to secure the funds for the project.
Such a move would probably spark a court battle as it is Congress, and not the president, that mainly decides how federal funds are spent.
Under the bill, the government could hire 75 new immigrant judge teams to help reduce a huge backlog in cases and hundreds of additional border patrol agents.
Hoping to reduce the violence and economic distress in Central America that fuels immigrant asylum cases in the US, the bill also provides $527m to continue humanitarian assistance to those countries.
The House appropriations committee said the bill would set a path for reducing immigrant detention beds to about 40,520 by the end of the fiscal year, down from a current count of about 49,060.
LINDSEY GRAHAM, WHO IS IN REGULAR CONTACT WITH THE WHITE HOUSE, SAID TRUMP WAS INCLINED TO TAKE THE DEAL AND MOVE ON