The U.S. Senate on Saturday night approved a 45-day stopgap funding bill in a last-minute effort to avert a federal government shutdown.

The upper chamber passed the stopgap funding measure in a 88-9 vote. Earlier that day, the House of Representatives approved the bill in a 335-91 vote.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has been struggling to gain support from hardliners in his own Republican Party on a funding bill, released the new plan Saturday morning. It would keep federal agencies funded at current levels until mid-November, and includes $16 billion of funding for disaster relief.

The new bill dropped steep spending cuts sought by conservative Republicans, and does not include additional aid for Ukraine sought by Democrats.

McCarthy's new proposal came as a surprise, as he had been trying to advance a funding bill with deep spending cuts and border security provisions, in attempts to garner support from Republican conservatives.

After last year's midterm elections, the Republican Party retook the House, with control of 221 seats, just nine more than the Democratic Party's 212 seats, meaning that even five rebels are enough to defeat a Republican bill.

The speaker's decision to put forward a "clean" stopgap funding bill was welcomed by Democrats and the White House, but upset some Republicans, especially party hardliners in the House, who had wanted to pass a bill without Democratic support and had threatened to remove him from the top House leadership post.

"This is good news, but I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place," U.S. President Joe Biden said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Biden on Saturday signed the bill, just a few minutes before federal government funding for this fiscal year was set to expire, according to the White House.

(Cover: This image from the U.S. Senate video shows the vote total, 88-9, on a temporary funding bill in the Senate at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 30, 2023. /CFP)