U.S. President Donald Trump signed legislation on Wednesday to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, just two hours after the House of Representatives voted to restore food assistance, pay hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
The Republican-led House approved the bill 222–209, with Trump’s backing helping unify his party despite strong Democratic opposition over the failure to secure extended federal health insurance subsidies.
Trump's signature on the bill, (the funding package was cleared by the Senate earlier in the week), will bring federal workers idled by the 43-day shutdown back to their jobs starting as early as Thursday.
However, it remains unclear how quickly full government services and operations will resume.
"We can never let this happen again," Trump said in the Oval Office during a late-night signing ceremony that he used to criticise Democrats.
"This is no way to run a country."
The deal extends funding through to 30 January, leaving the federal government on a path to keep adding about $1.8 trillion a year to its $38 trillion in debt.
The shutdown's end offers some hope that services crucial to air travel in particular would have some time to recover with the critical Thanksgiving holiday travel wave just two weeks away.
Restoration of food aid to millions of families may also make room in household budgets for spending as the Christmas shopping season moves into high gear.
It also means the restoration in coming days of the flow of data on the U.S. economy from key statistical agencies.
Some data gaps are likely to be permanent, however, with the White House saying employment and Consumer Price Index reports covering the month of October might never be released.
By many economists' estimates, the shutdown was shaving more than a tenth of a percentage point from gross domestic product over each of the roughly six weeks of the outage, although most of that lost output is expected to be recouped in the months ahead.
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