US Congress returns, with a one-month deadline to avert government shutdown

The U.S. Congress returns on Tuesday with less than a month left to perform one of its core functions – keeping federal agencies funded and averting a partial government shutdown – a job that it has struggled to perform in recent years.
The chamber’s bitter partisan divides have hardened in the first year of President Donald Trump’s new administration, which has angered Democratic lawmakers by deciding not to spend some money previously approved under bipartisan deals, as well as the July passage of a tax-cut bill that nonpartisan analysts said could cause more than 10 million low-income Americans to lose healthcare coverage.
Lawmakers’ work on agreeing on the roughly $1.8 trillion in discretionary spending in the $7 trillion federal budget will be further complicated by expected fights over the release of information related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump’s, and the administration’s surge of federal agents and National Guard into the capital.