The federal government is open again, at least for now, following the longest shutdown in U.S. history.<\/p>\n
President Trump signed a short-term funding bill on Thursday morning, hours after it passed the House with a vote of 222 to 209.<\/p>\n
The measure passed the Senate on Monday.<\/p>\n
It funds the government through January 30th, but doesn’t include Democrats’ demands to extend health care subsidies.<\/p>\n
That is expected to be taken up next month.<\/p>\n
69 News spoke with Lehigh Valley Congressman Ryan Mackenzie on Thursday about the legislation passing.<\/p>\n
He expressed relief, but said it took “far too long.”<\/p>\n
“Millions of people across the country were devastated because they were either federal employees themselves or used federal programs,” Mackenzie said. “So very grateful that the Senate Democrats actually ended up siding with Republicans, finding a bipartisan solution.”<\/p>\n
The reopening of the government ends 43 days of economic disruptions, from flight cancellations to halted food stamps.<\/p>\n
The agriculture secretary says he hopes most SNAP recipients will have their benefits by the end of the week — and at the very latest, Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The federal government is open again, at least for now, following the longest shutdown in U.S. history. President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,232,153,155,154,856,50],"class_list":["post-33470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown-area","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-national","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}