The US Congress returns on Tuesday with less than a month left to perform one of its core functions — keeping federal agencies funded and averting a partial government shutdown , a job it has struggled to perform in recent years.

The chamber’s bitter partisan divides have hardened in the first year of President Trump’s new administration, which has angered Democratic lawmakers by deciding not to spend some money previously approved under bipartisan deals, as well as the July passage of a tax cut bill that nonpartisan analysts said could cause more than 10 million low-income Americans to lose health care coverage.

Lawmakers’ work on agreeing on the roughly $1.8 trillion in discretionary spending in the $7 trillion federal budget will be further complicated by expected fights over the re

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