US hours from government shutdown over Christmas

Washington (AFP) – US lawmakers raced Friday to stave off a government shutdown set to bite within hours, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk sabotaged a bipartisan agreement that would have kept the lights on well beyond Christmas.

If no deal is struck, the government will cease to be funded at midnight, and non-essential operations will start to grind to halt, with up to 875,000 workers furloughed and 1.4 million more required to work without pay.

"Republicans blew this deal up. They did. They blew it up, and they need to fix it," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

Congress's setting of government funding is always a fraught task with both chambers closely divided between Republicans and Democrats.

But the latest drama has been intense after Republican president-elect Trump and tech billionaire Musk, his incoming "efficiency czar," killed an original bipartisan agreement with almost no time to go back to the drawing board.

Trump ordered Republicans to drop the legislation Wednesday after Musk had unleashed a blizzard of social media posts -- many of them wildly inaccurate -- trashing the deal.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a Plan B -- backed by Trump and Musk -- to scrape out extra spending, fund the government and assuage Trump's demands that the package include a two-year suspension of the country's borrowing cap.

Lawmakers suspended the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025 -- but Trump wants the contentious and time-consuming issue handled before he takes office next month.

Johnson's "Plan B" would have allowed the country's debt to rise by trillions of dollars unchecked, and 38 fiscal hawks in the Republican ranks rejected it, ignoring Trump's threats of backing primary challengers to those who defied him.
'President Musk'

With 10 hours to go until federal functions begin closing down, House Republicans were huddled in frantic meeting at the US Capitol to discuss a Plan C -- breaking up the package into three separate bills.

This would mean a vote to fund the government at current levels though mid-March, another on providing $100 billion for victims of two devastating hurricanes and other disasters and a third to give economic assistance to farmers.

It would allow lawmakers who oppose the aid to still support the government funding.

The series would not include a vote on the thorny debt ceiling issue, which would be punted into 2025 and the plan does away with most of the unrelated spending that angered conservatives.

Whether Republicans can persuade enough Democrats to come to their side to make up for the rebels on their own benches remains to be seen.

Any deal in the House would have to be rubber-stamped by the Senate in any case, a process that could take days under the rules governing the upper chamber if any individual member objects to fast-tracking it.

Patty Murray, the Democrats' top senator on budget issues said she was willing to stay in Washington "through Christmas" to ensure that the add-ons in the original bipartisan funding plan were reinstated.

Trump has been clear that he is happy for the government to shut down if he doesn't get his way.

With a shutdown for the weekend at least looking likely, the White House Office of Management and Budget was alerting agencies to prepare.

Meanwhile Musk's influence over the Republicans in Congress -- and his apparent sway with Trump -- has become a focus for Democratic attack.

"Elon Musk has Donald Trump in a vice," Democratic New York Congressman Dan Goldman told MSNBC. "And it is very clear that Elon Musk is now calling the shots.'

Democrats have attempted to rile Trump -- who is famously sensitive to being upstaged -- by referring to "President Musk."