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House moves to punt government funding fight past midterms

▶ Watch Video: Mike Johnson urges lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act before monthlong recess

Washington — The House on Tuesday approved a short-term extension to fund the government until Dec. 4, hoping to punt the annual funding fight past the November midterm elections. 

The funding patch, known as a continuing resolution, passed in a 220 to 205 vote. Six Democrats voted with all but one Republican in favor. 

“The CR is as clean as they come. There are no poison pills. There’s no maneuvers. There’s nothing other than a simple extension of current funding levels,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said Tuesday. 

Its passage comes days before the House is set to leave Washington for its five-week August recess. The measure now heads to the Senate, which is scheduled to be in town through the first week of August. 

Government funding runs out on Sept. 30, leaving lawmakers limited time to avoid a shutdown before they head into the final stretch of campaign season. 

“We want to take away the possibility of a shutdown between now and the election,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, said Monday. “We’ve seen that happen twice in this Congress already, generated by the Senate, and I’m not willing to risk a third time if we can avoid that.” 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that he will put a short-term spending bill on the floor before the upper chamber goes on recess. 

“That is something that I intend to bring to the floor for a vote before the August break,” the South Dakota Republican said. 

Thune also indicated that he could use the House’s budget resolution, which the lower chamber hopes to pass later this week, as a vehicle to fund the government through November. That resolution would kickstart the reconciliation process, which allows Senate Republicans to pass funding bills with a simple majority and no Democratic votes. 

“I hope that’s not necessary,” he said. “We’ve had conversations, productive conversations, on both sides of the aisle on a funding resolution that would carry us past the November election.” 

Since April, the House Appropriations Committee has advanced all 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. Three have been approved by the full House. The process, however, has broken down in the Senate, where none of the funding measures have made it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee. 

House Republicans’ continuing resolution extends funding at current levels and excludes any controversial add-ons — something Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, acknowledged Monday. 

But DeLauro said she would not support the measure because it fails to carry over a provision that zeroed out funding for Border Patrol, which she argued would allow the Trump administration to move funds allotted to the rest of Customs and Border Protection to the agency. In April, Congress passed a bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security — with the exception of immigration enforcement agencies — that ended the lengthiest government shutdown in U.S. history. 

“Chairman Cole’s bill does not continue that agreement, giving the Trump administration permission to use billions provided by this bill to fund Border Patrol without any substantial reforms to how that agency operates,” DeLauro said. “It’s a clear line in the sand that Democrats have drawn for months.” 

In a statement ahead of the vote, House Democratic leaders called the measure “a premature and desperate attempt by Republicans to abdicate their responsibility to govern while there are still several months left to negotiate a bipartisan agreement.” 

“The House Republican continuing resolution gives the Trump administration even more power over the federal budget and fails to block funding for Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California said. 

The world’s oldest president left for a ‘brief stay’ in Europe. He hasn’t returned in two months

By CNN
(CNN) — When Paul Biya won his first presidential election in Cameroon in 1984, Nformi Bime was 23 and still a student.Bime is now 65 and retired from teaching. Biya is 93 – and still president. Last year, he won a disputed eighth term that could keep him in office until he is nearly 100.“The best is yet to come,” Biya said before the election, which his opponents called fraudulent and was marred by deadly clashes between protesters and police.For the past two months, however, the man who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, when as prime minister he assumed power following the resignation of the sitting president, has been thousands of miles away. He left on June 7 for what his office called a “brief private stay in Europe” — now his longest uninterrupted absence from the Central African nation in years.Last week, government spokesman René Emmanuel Sadi told French radio RFI that Biya was in Geneva, Switzerland and was not hospitalized, but did not give more detail on his whereabouts.A president who is rarely seenBiya is Cameroon’s second president since independence in 1960 and one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. He first won office in 1984 under a one-party system, then won six more elections after multiparty politics was introduced.He has spent extended periods abroad during his presidency. But his latest absence has revived questions about his health and who is running the country while he is away.Rumors about Biya’s health and whereabouts have long been part of public life in Cameroon, where he is rarely seen in public. His office has repeatedly had to push back against speculation that he was seriously ill or had died. In 2024, the government banned media discussions about his health, calling them a national security matter.Biya’s long rule also reflects a wider contrast across Africa. The continent has the world’s youngest population, but several countries are still led by aging leaders whose political careers began decades ago, including former liberation figures now governing in a different era.For millions of Cameroonians, Biya is the only president they have ever known.Bime’s children are among them. His oldest is 32, and his youngest is 18.Abit Riassai Acha, a 26-year-old doctoral student and community youth leader at the University of Yaoundé II, belongs to the same generation.“Growing up, President Biya was the only president I knew, so his presidency has been part of my entire experience of Cameroon,” said Acha, who voted for the first time in last year’s presidential election, backing the youthful opposition candidate Samuel Hiram Iyodi, 38.After more than four decades under the same president, questions about his leadership have only grown.“Because this has happened repeatedly over the years, many Cameroonians have become used to it,” Acha said of Biya’s long absences. “But becoming accustomed to something does not necessarily mean that people should stop asking questions about how the country is being governed.”Iyodi, who finished eighth in last year’s presidential election, which several candidates, including one of Biya’s main challengers, were barred from contesting, has called on parliament to ask Cameroon’s Constitutional Council to consider whether Biya’s absence amounts to a vacancy in the presidency. But such a move is unlikely to succeed, given the dominance of Biya’s ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement.Despite being away, Biya has continued to make key decisions from abroad, including a major military reshuffle announced earlier this month. Yet questions about his prolonged stay overseas have left officials publicly assuring Cameroonians that their president is still alive.Government spokesman Sadi dismissed concerns about a power vacuum, telling RFI that “President Paul Biya is alive” and “will soon return.”From hope to frustrationBime is old enough to remember when Biya was the change. He first heard Biya’s name in the 1970s, when he served as secretary-general of the presidency under Cameroon’s first president after independence, Ahmadou Ahidjo. After Ahidjo resigned in 1982, Biya took over.When Biya first appeared on the ballot two years later, Bime saw him as a “representation of hope,” he said. “We believed he was young and dynamic – handsome too. He meant so much to Cameroonians.”Few imagined that the man they saw as a new beginning would remain in power for decades. For his critics, the disappointment is not just about how long Biya has stayed in office, but what they see as his failure to improve the lives of ordinary Cameroonians.Political analyst Collins Molua Ikome, a Cameroonian based in Germany, said he saw some of the country’s problems firsthand when he visited Cameroon in April.“Roads in Cameroon are extremely bad. I even witnessed a fatal accident,” he told CNN.Ikome also pointed to frequent power cuts, corruption and a lack of jobs for young people.Wilson Tamfuh, a public and international law professor at the University of Dschang in West Cameroon, said the country has institutions that can keep the government running when the president delegates responsibilities. Key duties, he said, can be handled by the prime minister, the secretary-general at the presidency and ministers.But the bigger question, Tamfuh said, is whether the government is solving the country’s longstanding problems.“People want the Anglophone crisis resolved, standards of living ameliorated, more good roads, fewer people on the streets with degrees, and more,” he told CNN, referring to the years-long separatist conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions.Whenever Biya eventually leaves office, his successor will inherit a country also facing attacks by Boko Haram militants in the north and deep economic frustration among young people.Healthcare is another concern. Ikome said access to quality healthcare remains out of reach for many Cameroonians.“Life expectancy in the country is below 70 years. However, Biya has far outlived that due to access to medical healthcare abroad, which the ordinary Cameroonian cannot access due to poverty,” Ikome said.The divide is not unique to Cameroon. Across Africa, political elites have often sought healthcare or maintained homes abroad, even as public services at home struggle.For Bime, the question is more personal: Will he live to see another president?After decades of waiting for change, he worries he may not – and that Biya could outlive him and many others who are not part of the country’s elite.“Anytime they have a cold, they run overseas and are taken care of, but the other Cameroonians are dying because of lack of care,” he said.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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