(Updates with Senate passage) By Richard Cowan WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate, just minutes before a midnight deadline, on Friday passed legislation to keep the U.S. government running through Feb. 15 after the outgoing Republican-led Congress failed to approve a series of regular spending bills. The Senate's unanimous vote followed a 370-20 approval in the U.S. House of Representatives of the stopgap funds. The money bill now goes to President George W. Bush to sign into law. Without the legislation, many government programs ranging from farm subsidies to foreign aid could have come to a halt this weekend. Approval of the stopgap-spending measure came after nine of the 11 appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began in October stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. During House debate, Democratic Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the next chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, called the temporary spending bill "a blatant admission of abject failure by the most useless Congress in modern times." It will now be up to Democrats who take control of the next Congress to figure out how to allocate funds for the rest of the fiscal year. Both Republicans and Democrats in the House complained about having to pass the stopgap spending bill. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, a California Republican, put blame "squarely...at the feet" of retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, saying he had failed to move the spending bills through the Senate. With a space shuttle scheduled to lift off on Saturday, the House vote provided relief for NASA workers, some of whom could have faced immediate layoff. NASA spokesman Grey Hautaloma said a government shutdown would not have affected essential personnel who support the shuttle mission. "The poor astronauts are not going to be stranded in space," he said. Other programs could suffer as the temporary funding either freezes spending at last year's levels or makes reductions. That formula thwarts efforts by many lawmakers' to reverse program cuts for the poor this year. A senior Bush administration official recently complained that law enforcement initiatives to hire more U.S. attorneys and prosecutors and expand prison space also would stall. Overall, the programs still in need of funding through the end of September would cost the government about $460 billion this fiscal year. The stopgap bill shifts around some Veterans' Administration accounts so that $1.7 billion in added funds are available for veterans' health care programs stretched thin by wounded soldiers returning from the Iraq war. The only two fiscal 2007 spending bills enacted, which together amount to nearly $500 billion, fund the military and and domestic security programs. Obey said this Congress' failure to finish fiscal 2007 appropriations was "muddying the waters" for consideration of Bush's fiscal 2008 budget proposal, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill early next year.
