TLDR:
The US Senate has passed legislation to extend public funding and end a temporary government shutdown after missing a midnight deadline.
The new legislation looks to extend government funding until March 14, provide $US100 billion for disaster-hit states and $US10 billion for farmers.
Government funding will extend until March 14, after president-elect Donald Trump has been sworn into office.
The US Senate has passed legislation to extend public funding and end a temporary government shutdown after missing a midnight deadline to avert the closure.
The temporary shutdown came after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed legislation on Friday aimed at averting a midnight closure at Capitol Hill in Washington, in defiance of president-elect Donald Trump’s demand to approve trillions of dollars in new debt.
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President Joe Biden is expected to sign his final approval of the bill later on Saturday.
The new legislation extends government funding until March 14, provides $US100 billion ($159.9 billion) for disaster-hit states and $US10 billion for farmers.
The bill would also not raise the country’s debt ceiling, which Trump has pushed Congress to do before he is sworn into office on January 20.
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The package passed the House by a bipartisan vote of 366-34 after Republicans struck elements from the bill that were heavily criticised by Trump and his billionaire Department of Government Efficiency advisor Elon Musk.
Those elements included a provision that limited investments in China, which Democrats said would have conflicted with Mr Musk’s interests.
“He clearly does not want to answer questions about how much he plans to expand his businesses in China and how many American technologies he plans to sell,” Democratic Representative Rosa DeLauro said earlier on Friday on the House floor.
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Elon Musk helped kill a U.S. Congress bill. But much of what he spread was misinformation
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk played a key role this week in killing a bipartisan funding proposal that would have prevented a government shutdown, railing against the plan in a torrent of more than 100 X posts that included multiple false claims.
The X owner, an unelected figure, not only used his outsize influence on the platform to help sway Congress, he did so without regard for the facts and gave a preview of the role he could play in government over the next four years.
“Trump has got himself a handful with Musk,” John Mark Hansen, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, said.
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- [Musk] alleged that the plan included a 40 per cent raise for lawmakers. But the maximum pay increase possible through the proposal would have been 3.8 per cent, according to the Congressional Research Service.
- Musk also shared a post from another user that falsely claimed the bill provided $3 billion US in funding for a potential new stadium for the NFL’s Washington Commanders, commenting: “This should not be funded by your tax dollars!” […] However, no such funding is provided by the bill.
- Musk incorrectly claimed that “We’re funding bioweapon labs in this bill!” The plan provided funds for up to 12 regional biocontainment research laboratories, not facilities for creating bioweapons. It stipulates that among their uses, the labs will conduct biomedical research to prepare for biological agents such as emerging infectious diseases.
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[Edit to include a link.]
“He clearly does not want to answer questions about how much he plans to expand his businesses in China and how many American technologies he plans to sell,” Democratic Representative Rosa DeLauro said earlier on Friday on the House floor.
This move can go in a number of directions, but I guess I’ll see how this plays out.
Elon Musk’s business in China sparks controversy
Did not spark adequate controversy would be a better fit.
The Prospect provides some more details:
This is the first scandal of the second Trump term, and take a long look, because it’s going to look like all the other scandals: a conflict of interest among his impossibly wealthy advisers and aides (or from Trump himself) seeps over into policy.
The measure at issue is known as the “outbound investment” provision. We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.
Congress […] finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.
[…] Cornyn-Casey [which added some reporting requirements and enhanced reviews] passed the Senate last year, and after about a year of legislative wrangling, a final outbound investment package made it into the year-end bill. “We’re taking a necessary step to safeguard American innovation against bad actors and ensure our lasting dominance on the world stage,” Cornyn said in a statement.
Funny story: Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.
You can argue about whether the U.S. should be restricting investment in China. But it’s incontrovertible that a billionaire who has a bunch of investments in China and wants to make more all of a sudden disrupted a normal congressional process that was going to restrict that investment with a bunch of lies from his media platform. And lo and behold, when the new funding bill emerged, the outbound investment feature was dropped. In fact, all traces of provisions related to China were removed from the bill.