Trump signs funding package, ending brief partial government shutdown

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Trump signs funding package, ending brief partial government shutdown

2026-02-04 09:14 Last Updated At：02-05 11:32

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a massive funding package, ending a partial government shutdown that began Saturday.

The bill narrowly passed the House of Representatives earlier Tuesday after gaining Senate approval on Friday.

The latest package will fund multiple U.S. federal agencies for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

The agencies include the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), originally included in the omnibus funding package, has been removed. The department will instead receive a two-week continuing resolution at current funding levels, allowing both parties and the White House to continue negotiations on immigration enforcement.

The recent two fatal shootings by federal enforcement personnel in the state of Minneapolis have prompted Democrats to seek changes to how immigration agencies operate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that until Immigration and Customs Enforcement is properly reined in and overhauled legislatively, the DHS funding bill does not have the votes to pass the Senate.

In recent years, as political polarization between the Republican and Democratic parties has intensified, the U.S. federal government has repeatedly fallen into crises of shutdown or being on the brink of shutdown. A record-breaking federal government shutdown that lasted 43 days came to an end more than two months ago.

China launches Shenzhou-23 manned spaceship

China's Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwest on Sunday, sending three astronauts to its orbiting space station.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, lifted off from the launch site at 23:08 Beijing Time (15:08 GMT).

The crew members consist of mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, and fellow astronauts Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying, who is also the first astronaut from China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

In another notable first, one of the crew members is set to undertake a year-long stay aboard the space station, double the usual duration of previous Shenzhou missions.

After entering orbit, the Shenzhou-23 spaceship will perform a fast automated rendezvous and docking with the radial port of the space station core module Tianhe, forming a combination of three modules and three spacecraft.

Shenzhou-23 marks the 40th flight of China's manned spaceflight program and the seventh manned flight mission since the Tiangong space station entered its application and development phase in late 2022.