Washington DC December 30 2022: President Joe Biden signed a $1.7 trillion government funding bill that includes $47 billion in additional aid for Ukraine in a victory for Democrats who feared that Republicans who will have control of the House in January could force deeper spending cuts and block assistance to Kyiv.
Biden, who is on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, signed the bill on Thursday. Staff sent the bill to the president for his signature on a regularly scheduled commercial flight, according to the White House.
In a tweet, Biden said the bill marked “a year of historic progress.”
The fresh assistance to Ukraine adds to the $65 billion the US has already appropriated this year to address Russia’s invasion and follows an address to Congress earlier this month by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who is likely to become speaker, has vowed to subject the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine to greater oversight when his party takes control of the House next month and said Kyiv would no longer get a “blank check.”
The omnibus spending bill, which provides government funding for the rest of fiscal 2023, also includes a raft of unrelated policy measures, including the Electoral Count Act, which clarifies how Electoral College votes are tallied and can be challenged, a congressional response to the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was preparing to certify Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
The compromise must-pass spending bill forced Democrats to sign on to less funding then they sought. There are no additional funds for Covid-19 vaccines or testing that Biden asked Congress to provide.
