White House announced partial shutdown threat in US
The United States may again face a shutdown – a partial cessation of government funding which may occur in about a fortnight – as noted by White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, RIA Novosti reports
“We are just 12 days away from parts of the government shutting down. Instead of doing their jobs, House Republicans left Washington in the middle of December. And they’re not back until next week,” Jean-Pierre is confident.
Opposition to Biden’s budget policies is especially strong in the House of Representatives. It resumes its work on January 9th. At the same time, Biden himself left Washington and moved to a country residence before Catholic Christmas, returned for one day, and then went to celebrate the New Year on a Caribbean island, where – based on photographs – he was very tanned. He returned to the White House on January 2nd. The US administration’s opponents, Republicans, analysed the data and said that Biden had spent more than a third of his time at country or beach residences since starting his presidency. The White House responded to this criticism by saying that wherever Biden is, he fulfils his duties as head of state.
Earlier, the US administration and Congress could not come to a common decision on adopting a full budget, and legislators adopted a compromise budget before finalising government funding. According to the law, funds will be allocated to several government departments and programmes by January 19th, and for others – by February 2nd. However, this document did not plan to allocate the funds requested by the administration to help Ukraine and Israel. It also does not include the budget cuts that Republicans want to achieve.
