Congress approved legislation late at the end of the month, with only three hours to spare before the self-imposed deadline, to keep the government open, avoiding the chaos of snarled traffic and closed national parks that had punctuated previous shutdowns in recent years.

The Republican Party, which controls the House of Representatives, had embarked on a handful of attempts to find a way forward amid dissension in its ranks. In the end, Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed a 45-day continuing resolution that found support to the tune of 335 Representatives, including all but one Democrat. (A full 90 of the 91 "no" votes came from the GOP.) The Senate then passed the bill, on a vote of 88–9 (with Republicans again providing the negatives), and President Joe Biden quickly signed it into law.

The continuing resolution requires further negotiations to take place in November, by which time the House could well have a new Speaker. McCarthy, in gaining the speakership earlier in the year, had acquiesced to hard-line demands that he put in place measures making it very easy for a member of the House to call for a vote on the speaker's ouster. Hard-liners in his own party had called for extreme spending cuts to programs that provide nutritional aid to pregnant mothers and funds for medical research and other measures that more moderate Republicans and even McCarthy himself could not agree with. It was reminiscent of a similar deal that the two major political parties at the 11th hour to avert a government default this past spring. And after the deal was announced, the hard-liners who had opposed it hinted that they would soon trigger a vote to oust McCarthy.

The bill includes badly needed disaster relief funds, in a year of increasing damage caused by natural disasters, and a provision to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. A shutdown would have meant that air traffic controllers would have had to work while not being paid and that training of new controllers and the development of new technology to aid in that training would cease.

Significantly, the new bill contains no funding to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. Ukrainian PResident Volodymyr Zelensky had appeared in Washington, D.C., to make a personal appeal to lawmakers for more money, and the White House had suggested a sum of $20.6 billion in foreign aid to that effect. The Senate had passed a bill allocating $6 billion, but the House wanted none of that. Members of the House promised to introduce such legislation soon.