By Richard Cowan, David Morgan and Makini Brice
WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress early on Saturday overwhelmingly passed a $1.2 trillion budget bill, keeping the government funded through a fiscal year that began six months ago and sending it to President Joe Biden to sign into law and avert a partial shutdown.
The vote on passage was 74-24.
Key federal agencies including the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, State and Treasury, which houses the Internal Revenue Service, will remain funded through Sept. 30 after the bill was passed in the Democratic-majority Senate.
But the measure did not include funding for mostly military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel, which are included in a different Senate-passed bill that the Republican-led House of Representatives has ignored.
Senate leaders spent hours on Friday negotiating a number of amendments to the budget bill that ultimately were defeated. The delay pushed passage beyond a Friday midnight deadline.
But the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a statement saying agencies would not be ordered to shut, expressing confidence that the Senate would promptly pass the bill, which it did.
While Congress got the job done, deep partisan divides were on display again, as well as bitter disagreement within the House's narrow and fractious Republican majority. Conservative firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to force a vote to remove Speaker Mike Johnson, a fellow Republican, for allowing the measure to pass.
The 1,012-page bill provides $886 billion in funding for the Defense Department, including a raise for U.S. troops. Biden, a Democrat, has indicated he will sign it.
Johnson, as he has done more than 60 times since succeeding his ousted predecessor Kevin McCarthy in October, relied on a parliamentary maneuver on Friday to bypass hardliners within his own party, allowing the measure to pass by a 286-134 vote that had substantially more Democratic support than Republican.
For most of the past six months, the government was funded with four short-term stopgap measures, a sign of the repeated brinkmanship that ratings agencies have warned could hurt the creditworthiness of a federal government that has nearly $34.6 trillion in debt.
"This legislation is truly a national security bill — 70% of the funding in this package is for our national defense, including investments that strengthen our military readiness and industrial base, provide pay and benefit increases for our brave servicemembers and support our closest allies," said Republican Senator Susan Collins, one of the main negotiators.