US Senate passes budget deal

The US Senate passed a two-year bipartisan budget deal on Friday by a comfortable margin, boosting federal spending by $80bn.

The bill, for which senators voted 64-35, passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday and will now go to President Barack Obama to be signed.

The budget deal will lift mandatory spending caps on defence and domestic programmes and raise the federal debt ceiling to March 2017, averting the threat of another government shutdown.

As part of the deal, defence and domestic programme spending will be raised by $50bn in fiscal 2016. The Overseas Contingency Operations fund will also cover $32bn more in defence spending to be used to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and for continued military activities in Afghanistan.

The outcome was a compromise between Republicans who wanted defence spending to be upped and Democrats who were keen to increase domestic spending.

In addition, congressional leaders have proposed to 58m barrels of oil from US emergency reserves over six years starting in 2018.