Adds updates throughout.
The US Senate has reached a deal to pass a $468bn bill that will fund parts of the federal government through 30 September and sell off a 1mn bl gasoline reserve in the US northeast that has never been drawn down since its creation a decade ago.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said tonight the chamber had reached an agreement that will avoid a partial government shutdown that would have started after midnight. The bipartisan deal will allow final passage of six funding bills and provide "momentum and space" to fund the remainder of the government before a 22 March deadline, he said.
Republican demands to hold amendment votes had threatened a brief shutdown, but the deal will avoid any lapse in funding. The spending bill has broad bipartisan support and earlier today cleared a procedural hurdle in a 63-33 vote.
The "minibus" spending agreement will provide full-year funding to the US Department of Energy (DOE), the US Interior Department, the US Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies. In addition to funding part of the government, the bill will require selling off the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve — which consists of 700,000 bl in the New York Harbor area, 200,000 bl in Massachusetts and 100,000 bl in Maine. The US created the reserve in 2014 by leasing storage space in commercial tanks, with the goal of avoiding the fuel shortages experienced after Superstorm Sandy. But the federal government has never drawn down fuel from the reserve.
The gasoline reserve is not "well suited" for easing severe fuel supply shortages from an emergency, the nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office said in a 2022 report. And at an annual cost of $13/bl, it is expensive to maintain. Because the reserve consists of gasoline in commercial tanks, any power outages or fuel distribution problems that are responsible for regional shortages would likely also affect the reserve, the report said.
The spending bill will also prohibit DOE from selling crude or petroleum products from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve for export to China or to entities owned or controlled by China. Republicans last year passed legislation seeking such a ban because of complaints that China had bought crude to refill its own strategic reserves.
The upcoming passage of the "minibus" bill marks an anticlimactic end to demands by far-right House Republicans for Congress to fund the government by passing a dozen separate spending bills, which they said would give lawmakers more ability to constrain spending. The same Republicans repeatedly blocked the House from voting on those bills over policy complaints, meaning any bills that could pass required broad Democratic support.
