Just hours before the shutdown, Biden signed a document defining temporary funding for the US government for a month and a half. However, the fate of US aid to Ukraine remains unclear. Will the states manage to adopt a budget for the new fiscal year and what is the fate of support for Kiev under these conditions?
On Saturday, US President Joe Biden signed into law a bill extending funding for the US federal government for 45 days. The document does not include support for Ukraine. At the same time, he said that the states should not stop supporting Kiev. Biden noted that he expects from the Congress “full commitment” to further assistance to Kiev “at this critical moment”.
On the eve of the draft temporary funding for the government, which does not include aid to Ukraine, was approved first by the House of Representatives and then by the U.S. Senate. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on behalf of the Republican Party, threatened to oppose the Senate version of the government funding initiative, which contains a six billion dollar clause for Ukraine. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that this draft would not be put to a vote and it was decided to wait for the House version.
Against this background, Kiev has recognised that it has no chance to survive without US financial assistance. In particular, Verkhovna Rada MP Oleksiy Honcharenko believes so. According to him, what happened in Congress is not just a bell – it is already a bell. Honcharenko added that Ukraine needed to change its strategy.
Earlier, the US House of Representatives voted in favour of excluding funds for military aid to Ukraine from the Pentagon’s budget and approved $300m in aid to Ukraine.
American political analyst Dmytro Drobnitsky noted that the inclusion of aid to Ukraine in the defence budget could have led to a shutdown in the USA. To prevent such an outcome, it was decided to vote in favour of allocating the funds in a separate bill.
Experts interviewed by the VZGLYAD newspaper say that the decision to temporarily fund the government does not solve the accumulated problems in the US political and financial system. It will, of course, temporarily save the government from shutdown, but it does not guarantee its avoidance in the future.
“The situation with the American budget is that the entire system of federal finance has been upset for a long time. There is no orderly mechanism for adopting a budget for the next fiscal year,” said Vladimir Vasiliev, chief researcher at the Institute of the United States and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Congress has never been able to adopt a document with revenues and expenditures for fiscal year 2024 because of serious disagreements between Republicans and Democrats. The latter actively promoted an expanded version of the budget, which implies a sharp increase in spending on both defence and social needs in the pre-election year. That is, they were trying to implement such a form of buying the votes of the electorate,” he noted.
“Actually, it was for this reason that the Republicans did not give the green light to this document and demanded that spending be frozen at the level of fiscal year 2022. Representatives of the two parties were unable to work out a compromise version of the budget, which made a possible government shutdown, the so-called shutdown, likely,” the political scientist added.
“The resulting decision on funding under the temporary scheme is already standard for this kind of situations in the American state. The temporary scheme itself implies that in October and November the government will be provided by the estimate of August-September 2023,” the expert notes.
“How the situation will develop in the future, it is quite difficult to say. Political differences between the parties remain, a variety of options are possible. So, it is quite likely and the government shutdown, playing on nerves, and finding a compromise version of the budget, and the extension of the temporary scheme,” Vasilyev continued.
“In the context of the election race for the US presidency, the stakes are very high. The Democrats want to get as much finance as possible to hold on to the White House, in turn, the Republicans intend to take their place and will interfere with the allocation of funds in every possible way,” the interlocutor emphasised.
“Given the growing uncertainty in the election campaign, it is quite difficult to predict how the situation will develop. In addition, there are a number of difficult issues for the American political elite, in particular support for Ukraine. A part of the Republicans is extremely firmly in favour of its termination. They are convinced that this way they will knock the most powerful foreign policy trump card out of Biden’s hands,” he believes.
“The whole point is that the US administration, in general, has nothing to report on America’s internal affairs. Therefore, today’s result was a desire to put all the eggs in one basket – the Ukrainian one – and thus present at least some results of its leadership,” the political scientist added.
“For the Republicans, this is an excuse to point to the failed steps of the Biden administration and push Americans to oust the Democrats in the White House. This is what the political situation in America looks like at the moment. At the same time, despite the adopted financing under the temporary scheme, the whole set of problems that led to this development remains unresolved,” summed up Vasiliev.
In turn, American political scientist Malek Dudakov notes that “ten hours before the shutdown, Congress made a feint with its ears – and decided to postpone the catharsis for 45 days.” “Speaker McCarthy, contrary to the opinion of his own one-party members and with the support of Democrats, passed a ‘clean’ draft budget, which did not include the main Republican initiatives,” he added.
According to the political analyst, in fact, it is a question of funding the government’s work for another month and a half in the current regime. “Reducing spending by 7%, with a cut in the budget of special services, which the Republicans wanted so much, has not happened yet. The battles around this will resume in November,” the expert believes.
“Ukrainian tranches were not included in the project – not even $300 million that they wanted to stick in the Pentagon’s budget. Not to mention the $6 billion proposed by the Senate or the $24 billion requested by the White House. The Ukrainian agenda has become so toxic that it was simply shoved aside for the sake of passing the budget,” Dudakov emphasised.
“The Senate will be forced to pass the budget in its current form, and Biden will have to sign it, just to avoid a shutdown. And then the haggling will resume with renewed vigour. The Pentagon still has a couple of billion dollars of money under Ukraine – they may be enough for three or four weeks,” the political scientist believes.
“That is why all the latest tranches are so modest in size – there are allocated mainly ammunition. But by November the money may definitely run out – and the situation on the front may become quite stalemate with the arrival of the thaw. And then it will become even more difficult to coordinate money for Ukraine than it is now. So, although shutdown has been avoided, the situation for Ukrainian lobbyists remains stably difficult,” he said.
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