US Congress returns, with a one-month deadline to avert government shutdown

2/9/2025 19:03

The U.S. Congress returns on Tuesday with less than a month left to perform one of its core functions - keeping federal agencies funded and averting a partial government shutdown - a job that it has struggled to perform in recent years.



The chamber's bitter partisan divides have hardened in the first year of President Donald Trump's new administration, which has angered Democratic lawmakers by deciding not to spend some money previously approved under bipartisan deals, as well as the July passage of a tax-cut bill that nonpartisan analysts said could cause more than 10 million low-income Americans to lose healthcare coverage.



Lawmakers' work on agreeing on the roughly $1.8 trillion in discretionary spending in the $7 trillion federal budget will be further complicated by expected fights over the release of information related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump's, and the administration's surge of federal agents and National Guard into the capital.



There have been 14 partial government shutdowns since 1981, most of which lasted only a day or two. The most recent stretched over 34 days in December 2018 into January 2019 during Trump's first term.