At the end of the 20th day of the partial United States government shutdown, the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives passed a standalone spending bill to fund and reopen both the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Transportation, along with a handful of other agencies.
According to The Hill, the House voted 244-180 in favor of the measure to provide clean funding to the relevant departments. 12 Republicans crossed party lines to vote with Democrats on the proposed measure.
The bill is unlikely to make it any further than the lower house of Congress, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell earlier in the day blocked two other similar spending measures passed in the House from reaching the floor of the Senate, also according to The Hill.
The partial government shutdown has halted the endorsement of new Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs), and limited resources normally available to originators and borrowers from HUD. While originators recently related to RMD that they were going about business as usual in the early days of the shutdown, some warned that a prolonged funding battle in Washington could begin to affect things negatively.
An estimated 800,000 federal workers will be missing their first full paychecks on Friday due to the lack of appropriations for their employer agencies, according to the Washington Post. The stalemate in Washington is due to an ongoing dispute related to border security between the White House and Congressional Democrats.
