Congress avoids a government shutdown — for now. Here’s what you need to know.

Western unity around Ukraine is starting to strain as the conflict grinds on with largely static front lines, and as the politics in the United States and Europe become more volatile themselves.

Last weekend, in the US, Congress avoided a government shutdown, but only after it dropped billions in Ukraine aid from its short-term spending bill. Now, lawmakers who back Kyiv are scrambling to figure out how they can get Ukraine more funding as a faction of the GOP digs in against it.

Congress finally managed to squeeze out a deal to fund the government for 45 days on Saturday, but the eleventh-hour resolution is already causing trouble for Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida indicated Sunday that he will call for a motion to vacate — a vote to toss McCarthy from leadership for passing a continuing resolution that Gaetz says violates the terms of McCarthy’s speakership deal. For the rest of the country, a fight over the speakership takes away from the work of passing a long-term funding deal, as well as negotiating the future of aid to Ukraine.

With only hours to spare, Congress on Saturday narrowly avoided a government shutdown. The Senate approved a bill to keep the government open for the next 45 days by a vote of 88 to 9 after a dramatic reversal by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ensured an overwhelming House vote to keep the government open.

McCarthy had spent weeks trying to find a path that would both keep the government open and protect himself from an internal coup by hardliners within the House Republican conference. Ultimately, McCarthy opted to fund the government and challenge the hardliners to do their worst — opening him up to attempts to remove him from the House’s top job.

The US government sure looks like it’s on track for another shutdown.

Currently, the House of Representatives has yet to pass any legislation that would keep the government fully funded. If lawmakers fail to take action before midnight on October 1, the government will go into a partial shutdown that will result in hundreds of thousands of federal employees being furloughed, the closure of important facilities like immigration courts, and potential staffing shortages in fields like air traffic control.

This month, due to House Republican in-fighting, the US government is on the verge of a shutdown yet again.

It’s clear Congress doesn’t have time to pass the full-year bills it needs to in order to keep the government open before money runs out on September 30. At question is whether the House can keep the government running by passing a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution or CR, that’s acceptable to the House GOP caucus, Senate Democrats, and President Joe Biden in the limited window that’s left. Doing so would buy lawmakers the time they need to come to an agreement on longer-term funding bills, while avoiding a shutdown.

So it’s come to this: The US is facing another government shutdown.

Unless the GOP-run House passes stopgap funding before Sunday, the federal government will stop paying millions of workers and military servicemembers. Some services, like parks, will stop entirely, while other federal employees will simply be expected to work without pay.

The threat of a government shutdown seems to loom over Congress on an annual basis, and this year is no different.

In the coming days, Congress is scrambling to pass a continuing resolution (CR), or short-term spending bill, to avoid a shutdown before existing funding runs out on Friday. Lawmakers are broadly expected to do so: Democrats announced that they’ll vote on a one-week CR, which sets up a new deadline of December 23.

Toward the end of every year, the countdown until the United States government goes into a shutdown begins. Congress and the president usually avoid it in the final hour, but sometimes they don’t manage to agree on a spending bill and the government actually shuts down. The US is really the only country that does this.

The longest shutdown in history, in 2019, lasted 35 days. Federal workers — and many contractors — didn’t get a paycheck for 35 days. Some of those employees were furloughed, meaning they didn’t have to go to work, but more than half of them still had to go into the office unpaid.