President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed legislation ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, hours after the House of Representatives voted to restart disrupted food assistance, pay hundreds of thousands of federal workers and revive a hobbled air-traffic control system, Reuters reported.
The Republican-controlled chamber passed the package by a vote of 222-209, with Trump's support largely keeping his party together in the face of vehement opposition from House Democrats, who are angry that a long standoff launched by their Senate colleagues failed to secure a deal to extend federal health insurance subsidies.
Trump's signature on the bill, which cleared 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, although just how quickly full government services and operations will resume is unclear.
"We can never let this happen again," Trump said in the Oval Office during a late-night signing ceremony that he used to criticize Democrats. "This is no way to run a country."
The deal extends funding through January 30, leaving the federal government on a path to keep adding about $1.8 trillion a year to its $38 trillion in debt.
"I feel like I just lived a Seinfeld episode. We just spent 40 days and I still don't know what the plotline was," said Republican Representative David Schweikert of Arizona, likening Congress' handling of the shutdown to the misadventures in a popular 1990s U.S. sitcom.
"I really thought this would be like 48 hours: people will have their piece, they'll get a moment to have a temper tantrum, and we'll get back to work."
He added: "What's happened now when rage is policy?"
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. The absence of data had left investors, policymakers and households largely in the dark about the health of the job market, the trajectory of inflation and the pace of consumer spending and economic growth overall.
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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