A constitutionally mandated shutdown of the United States federal government was narrowly averted on Friday midnight, as the White House and Congress hammered out a deal to cut $38 billion in spending out of the 2010 budget proposals.
With less than an hour to go before the shutdown, President Barack Obama announced the deal he had made with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Had the shutdown occurred, more than 8 lakh federal employees, including U.S. soldiers serving abroad, would have seen their paycheques halted indefinitely. It would have also resulted in a wide range of non-essential federal workers being furloughed without pay, including those dealing with passport services, national park rangers and attendants at monuments and museums.
After a week of frantic negotiations, the talks on Friday night were said to have come down to issues of bitter partisan disagreement, including federal funding of abortion and financing of policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
After intense discussions on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama said in a statement: “In the final hours before our government would have been forced to shut down, leaders in both parties reached an agreement that will allow our small businesses to get the loans they need, our families to get the mortgages they applied for, and hundreds of thousands of Americans to show up at work and take home their paycheques on time, including our brave men and women in uniform.”
Under pressure from the ranks of fiscally conservative Tea Party members in the House, Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner and his Republican colleagues had been pressing the Obama administration to cut the U.S.' spiralling budget deficit.
