House Of Representatives, Government Shutdown | featured news

The House has approved legislation to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the month and give the Pentagon some relief from a cash crunch that's harming military readiness.

The House is taking its first step Wednesday to avoid a government shutdown, as Washington looks to forgo forcing a fiscal crisis this month and instead turns its attention to a more deliberate debate over long-term deficit reduction.

This is what a smaller government will look like: There will be less money for local cops, but more money for FBI agents. Less to repair public-housing complexes. More to feed hungry children. There will be less to fix polluted rivers. But more to fix crowded prisons.

The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that puts the government on stable financial footing for six weeks but does nothing to resolve a battle over spending that is likely to flare again.

The legislation will finance the government for the first four days of October, until lawmakers return and can vote on a more ambitious seven-week spending bill.

Republicans in the House of Representatives regrouped on Friday to approve a must-pass spending bill, but the prospect of a government shutdown loomed as Democrats said it would go nowhere in the Senate.

The U.S. House of Representatives unexpectedly defeated a bill that would fund the federal government past September 30 on Wednesday as dozens of Republicans broke with their party to push for deeper spending cuts.

Rival Democratic and Republican plans to raise the government's borrowing ability have thrust Congress into a standoff just one week away from a potentially devastating debt crisis.

Top Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration’s budget director both predicted Sunday that an agreement would be reached before the federal government defaults on its debt in early August, but both sides continued to squabble over the details of competing proposals, offering little evidence that a deal was at hand.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday said that he was “very concerned” about the status of negotiations on keeping the federal government funded past an April 8 deadline, saying that prospects for a government shutdown have increased since two weeks ago.