President Joe Biden praised bipartisan efforts to keep the government open tonight and funded through November but added that the last-minute scramble by House Republicans was a “manufactured crisis” that could have been avoided months ago.
“Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans,” the president said in a statement Saturday night, marking the passage of the stopgap bill.
Biden went on to slam House Republicans for a “manufactured crisis” saying, “We should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis.”
Biden did reiterate his support for Ukraine, urging Congress to pass separate funding for assistance to Ukraine in the war against Russia.
“While the Speaker and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been steadfast in their support for Ukraine, there is no new funding in this agreement to continue that support. We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” he said.
The stopgap bill will fund the government through November 17.
Earlier Saturday, a White House official said Biden is on standby right now to sign the short-term government funding bill as soon as it reaches his desk.
