USA: Government will soon be without money

Washington. The US House of Representatives has voted for a transitional budget to prevent the government from running out of money at the end of next week. The bill, adopted by a majority of 272 to 162 votes on Tuesday (local time), would secure funding until March 11. The second chamber of Congress, the Senate, has yet to approve the bill before it can be submitted to President Joe Biden for signature. Without the transitional budget, the government would run out of money on Friday next week. This could threaten a partial shutdown of government operations, a so-called “shutdown”.

The amount of the government’s permitted spending is to be updated by March with the new law on the basis of last year’s budget. The tedious tug-of-war over a complete budget for the current financial year continues in parallel.

The last transitional budget so far had only been adopted at the beginning of December – also shortly before the deadline to prevent a shutdown of the state apparatus. If there is a “shutdown” in the USA, state employees will have to be on compulsory leave or work temporarily without pay. Depending on the length of the outage, certain government services could also be restricted or payments delayed. The US government’s regular budget year runs from the beginning of October to the end of September.

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