Trump hits out at Congress as he signs government spending bill after threatening to veto legislation

Donald Trump has grudgingly signed a massive spending bill just hours after threatening to veto the measure, complaining that it does not include protections for young illegal immigrants or fully funds his long-promised border wall.

"But I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again," Mr Trump said.

The President said he seriously considered rejecting the $1.3 trillion spending package but decided not to out of concerns for national security.

"There are a lot of things we shouldn't have had in this bill but we were, in a sense, forced if we want to build our military, we were forced to have," Mr Trump said.

The Senate approved the 2,232-page measure in a 65-32 vote, about 12 hours after the House had also passed the legislation on a similarly wide bipartisan vote of 256-to-167.

"Nobody read it," Mr Trump said. "It’s only hours old."

In a rambling speech after signing the measure that was released on Wednesday, Mr Trump railed against Democrats several times, calling for an end to the Senate's filibuster rule, which would allow passage of all bills on a simple-majority vote. The rule encourages Democrats and Republicans to work together.

He also called on Congress to give him the ability to nix spending he disagrees with by granting him line-item veto power.

The Supreme Court has previously found that the line-item veto violated the Presentment Clause of the Constitution, which says the President does not have the power to unilaterally amend or repeal legislation

The government funding bill has been dogged by negotiations over the status of recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme, a policy from the Barack Obama era that Mr Trump announced last year he was rescinding. Democrats have accused the President of failing the young people DACA has protected from the threat of deportation. Mr Trump has, in turn, accused the party of walking away from deals to come up with a permanent legislative fix for the programme.

“I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,” Mr Trump tweeted just hours before signing the budget bill.

The announcement took Washington by surprise, with the White House having said earlier in the week that Mr Trump would back the bill after discussing it with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

If Mr Trump had not signed the measure by midnight on Friday night, the government most likely would have shut down.

“The president and the leaders discussed their support for the bill, which includes more funds to rebuild the military, such as the largest pay raise for our troops in a decade, more than 100 miles of new construction for the border wall and other key domestic priorities, like combatting the opioid crisis and rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

A White House official later added that Mr Trump “intends to sign the bill” and that it is a “step in the right direction”.

In many ways, the bill could be seen as a loss for Mr Trump, whose proposals for severe cuts to funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, State Department and other federal agencies were largely ignored.

While the President at one point wanted the bill to allocate $25bn to fully fund construction of his border wall, negotiations to make that happen fell apart.

Instead, under the budget deal, Mr Trump would get nearly $1.6bn for border security this year. More border patrol agents could be hired, but there would not be a significant increase in immigration agents working in the rest of the US.

When coupled with recently enacted tax cuts, the legislation is projected to lead to budget deficits of more than $800bn for this year, potentially creating problems for Republicans up for re-election in November.

Along with a $80bn increase in military spending, the largest in 15 years, the measure allocates money toward infrastructure improvements and fighting Russian election hacking.

In response to public outrage over mass shootings, including a massacre last month at a Florida high school that left 17 people dead, the bill contains modest improvements to background checks for gun sales and grants to help schools prevent gun violence.

Top Democrats had tied their support for previous budget bills to their receiving of commitments from Republicans to consider legislation that would salvage DACA. But with a standoff over the issue already leading to one of the government shutdowns this year, there appeared to be little appetite on Capitol Hill for a repeat of the same drama.

In exchange for Democratic votes to reopen the government in January, Mr McConnell promised to hold an immigration debate to discuss the issue. While such a debate was held, no immigration bill received enough support to pass.

Mr Trump had given Congress until March 5 to come up with a solution for DACA.

However, the Supreme Court declined to immediately review a federal judge’s order saying that Mr Trump must continue the programme. This means that DACA will stay in place until, or if, the Supreme Court takes it up, all but nullifying the March 5 expiration date.

“There’s not a whole lot of reason to negotiate – to do anything that is not already covered by the court decision,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said last week.