Trump signs stopgap spending bill to avoid shutdown

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Friday signed into law a temporary funding measure that staves off a government shutdown – at least for the next two weeks.
The House of Representatives and the Senate easily passed the measure on Thursday, which funds government operations through Dec 22.
The White House said Trump signed the measure Friday morning.
The measure gives Trump some breathing room to work with Democrats and his fellow Republicans in the coming weeks to thrash out a budget plan for fiscal year 2018 – the subject of fierce debate over policy and spending priorities.
The Republican Party controls both chambers of Congress, but in the Senate they will need at least a handful of Democratic votes in order to pass the spending bill.
While the two sides share some common goals, such as funding the programme that provides health insurance for millions of children, they remain divided on issues like the level of military funding compared to that for domestic programmes.
Senate Democrats earlier had threatened to block progress unless they won concessions from Republicans on a number of issues, notably the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the United States as children. — AFP