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Biden signs temporary spending bill that heads off a government shutdown

President Joe Biden speaks while sitting next to other leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco.
Jeff Chiu
/
AP
President Joe Biden speaks while sitting next to other leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO — President Biden signed a short-term government funding bill on Thursday, avoiding a potential government shutdown and pushing into next year debates about wartime funding for Ukraine and Israel.

Biden's approval came a day after the Senate overwhelmingly approved the stop-gap spending bill. The measure, designed by new House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., funds four federal agencies until Jan. 19, 2024 and the rest until Feb 2, 2024. The goal is to give Congress more time to negotiate long-term spending bills.

The president is in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, so the bill came out West for his signature. What the measure doesn't include is any of the funding Biden has said is urgently needed for Ukraine and Israel.

But the legislation keeps the lights on, and despite earlier reservations, once it was clear it would pass Congress, the White House signaled Biden would sign it.

At this point there is no clear path for those funding requests to even come up for a vote.

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Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations. She covered the final two years of the Obama presidency, and during the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association.