 The United States is once again facing the threat of a partial government shutdown. On December 16th, President Joe Biden signed a bill to avoid this partial shutdown for a week as discussions continued on the budget. The budget negotiation process in the US often becomes a political tug of war as both sides use it to push their own agenda and threaten a partial shutdown of the government if their demands are not met. How does the passing of the budget take place in the US and what gives rise to the possibility of a shutdown? Eugene Purir of Breakthrough News explains. You know, the US government constantly operates on this sort of funding cliff or it really has for maybe the past decade or so when the budget negotiation process became significantly more partisan under President Obama than perhaps in past years. But things like this have cropped up on a regular basis at different times. The basic reality is this is earlier in the year, the US government will debate and fund a budget and decide what it's going to be. But they always wait till the end of the year to pass the budget for a range of different reasons. But some of them are technical and preparing different things. Some of them are political that, as I will explain in just a little bit, make it easier to sneak in sort of last minute funding request and so on and so forth. And then also some of it has to do with taking into account things that happen in the wake of the immediate aftermath of the budgetary process, which sometimes adds to or changes the contours of what the budget may be. So you have this period that often crops up, not always at the end of the year, but sometimes oftentimes at the end of the year, where the budget has to actually be passed by Congress in order to continue to fund everything through the next fiscal year. So it's not as if the lights will turn off the next day, but all of the continuing operations that need to go on for the government to operate smoothly and then everything that requires government operations, so regulations, airports, really almost anything you can imagine that requires some form of interface with the federal government has to be able to have that smooth flow to keep the flow of commerce and life moving along in a general sense. So you don't want the government to shut down for any appreciable amount of time. So this is always used by the differing political parties on both sides of the fence, depending on what the mix is in Congress and who's in the presidency to force their priorities because nobody wants to be considered responsible for the government essentially shutting down and all of the potential cascading problems. So what you're willing to accept vis-a-vis a compromise from your opponents will the threshold for that will go up. So we are in another one of those processes here now where something called a continuing resolution gets passed to sort of keep the funding level where it is so that nothing stops or shuts down as a mode to create space for negotiation to pass the broader what's known as omnibus spending bills. That's the real budget. So that's what's happening right now essentially and in this particular condensed form and current events. But it basically has to do with the politicization of the budget process. That's really what it comes down to. The current stalemate takes place at a time of transition. This is the last session of the current Congress before the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives next year. Until now the Democrats had control of both House and Senate. In this context what are the differences between the two parties? What agenda items are each party trying to push or prevent and what is blocking an agreement? Well the key points of disagreement right now over the budget are essentially over the two agendas of the political parties. You've got the Democrats who are trying to get in before they lose control of both houses of Congress, some semblance of what the agenda that they have been promising voters they would be addressing since President Joe Biden has come in. You could think about it in the context of the build back better agenda that failed in 2021. But the same basic priorities of at least attempting to present themselves as promoting social spending to a more significant degree to help working class families. On the other hand we have the Republicans who will after the turn of the new year actually gain control of the House of Representatives and they certainly want to see a significantly reduced amount of social spending. In fact the whole discussion is around non-defense spending so they want to still see a huge multi-billion, 100 billion dollar defense budget but they want to significantly cut by tens of billions of dollars spending that's going to help support working class families in different ways from housing to education to healthcare and so on. So what really is happening now is a race to the finish line for the Democrats to be able to get enough votes in the Senate caucus and I think they certainly have it in the House to be able to pass something even though it is certainly lesser than what they're saying lesser than the need in general you know they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars less on homelessness for instance than what they said they would earlier in the year despite the fact that you're in a huge homelessness crisis. So they're not meeting the scale of the problem itself and they're also even watering down their own initial proposals but nevertheless something they could at least sell to Democratic voters to say well we did something in relationship to our broad priorities here when we had all the power to do it maybe even if it's not as much as you want. While the Republicans are hoping to kick the can down the road and find a way to get enough opposition so that they can get it to the new year 2023 and vote on this new budget in a time where they'll have significantly more leverage to be able to strip out that social spending. So really what we're seeing here is a competition to see who can do the least for working class families who are facing huge problems of course 160 million people struggling to meet their expenses week to week but nevertheless not seeing much relief here from Congress and probably won't despite the outcome of or whatever the outcome may be of this budget negotiation. While the two parties may differ on a number of issues they're usually united on the issue of defense spending. In fact in recent times Congress usually allocates more money than the federal government asks for for defense. What has been the trend this year? Yes defense spending is totally sacrosanct I mean you can see even in the discussions of what's going to be cut from the budget it's always the discussion of the non-defense spending so there's actually no real disagreement between either party that no one should touch the defense spending the over eight hundred billion dollars it's being appropriated this year and it's setting a record but you know that's almost becoming in and of itself a pass a statement because you know they set a record in 2021 they set a record in 2020 almost every year the US government is setting a record for defense spending and going each year above even what the presidents are requesting what the military itself is requesting so over eight hundred billion dollars going to go towards the military budget so we're seeing here this huge significant increase in programs many of which are struggling to even succeed like the F-35 fighter and others that tens of billions of dollars have already been spent and the weapons platforms are still only barely operable we are seeing the continued funding towards the overhaul that at the end of the day will cost a trillion dollars in US nuclear weapons funding going towards that as well significant changes in overhauls in the Marine Corps and others which were acquiring a vast buildout of all sorts of new weapons that are explicitly designed based on the new doctrine of how the Marine Corps is going to be used in the Pacific Ocean to essentially prepare for a nuclear conflict with China so I mean this is what they're spending these hundreds of billions of dollars on is this great power confrontation and deliberately shaping the forces of the US military to confront up to and including nuclear war Russia and China for more videos on people's struggles please subscribe to our YouTube channel