WASHINGTON: A $447 billion bill that would fund dozens of US government agencies through September cleared a procedural hurdle in the US Senate on Saturday and appeared to be headed for passage.

The Senate vote, 60 to 34, cleared the way for senators to give the measure final congressional passage on Sunday. The House of Representatives passed the measure on Thursday with no Republicans voting for it.

The Democratic-controlled Congress must pass the bill and President Barack Obama must sign it by Dec. 18 or extend a temporary measure to keep the federal government running.

The measure would boost spending for building high-speed rail and beefing up oversight of financial markets.

It also would boost lending programs for small businesses, which the Obama administration has identified as a way to bring down the nation’s 10 percent unemployment rate.

Needle-exchange programs — intended to ensure that diseases such as AIDS are not spread by infected needles shared by injection drug users — would have an easier time getting federal funding under the measure. Abstinence-only sex-education programs for schoolchildren would get less money.

The measure would fund numerous government agencies through the rest of the 2010 fiscal year, which ends next Sept. 30. Fiscal 2010 began on Oct. 1, but Congress has not passed spending bills for the year. In fact, Congress has not passed spending bills on time since 1994.

Lawmakers next week are expected to take up the largest spending bill of all — a $600 billion-plus measure that funds the Pentagon, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the US on Friday approved the most sweeping regulatory overhaul of the financial sector since the Great Depression of the 1930s, one of Obama’s key goals.

Lawmakers voted 223-202 to pass the 1,300-page legislation, a package of measures Obama’s Democratic allies crafted in response to the global financial meltdown of 2008, which has left the US economy still sputtering.

The US Senate was expected to take up the plan — which faces stiff opposition from the financial industry and its Republicans allies, not one of whom voted in favor of the plan — in 2010.

Obama hailed the vote in a statement, adding: “I urge both houses of Congress to pass this necessary reform as quickly as possible on behalf of the American people. I look forward to signing a strong bill.”

“The crisis from which we are still recovering was born not only of failure on Wall Street, but also in Washington. We have a responsibility to learn from it,” said the US president.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described the measure, a centerpiece of Obama’s response to the 2008 global financial meltdown, as a clear warning to Wall Street that “the party is over.”

“American families will no longer be at the mercy of Wall Street in terms of their jobs, their homes, their pension security, the education of their children,” Pelosi said Thursday.

Lawmakers had faced votes on several amendments, defeating one that would have scrapped a central provision, the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to oversee mortgages and credit cards.

The bill, which may help Democrats harness simmering voter anger ahead of the 2010 mid-term elections, has drawn fierce opposition from the financial sector and its Republican allies as stifling innovation with weighty new rules.

The No. 2 House Republican, Representative Eric Cantor, said the legislation “frightens people and creates uncertainty in the American economy, preventing job growth.”

The bill notably tackles the issue of firms deemed “too big to fail,” which received hundreds of billions of dollars in US government “bailout” cash because their collapse would have dealt crippling blows to the economy.

The legislation gives regulators the power to dismantle such giants, and lays out a systematic way to unwind them in case of collapse that ensures shareholders and unsecured creditors, not taxpayers, bear the losses.

It also reinforces the powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission to detect irregularities that could provide an early warning of fraudulent investment schemes, like the fraud perpetrated by Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff.

The measure also includes a first-of-its-kind plan to regulate the vast market in arcane financial products called derivatives.

It would give the Federal Reserve broader powers to oversee large at-risk firms, but also give the Government Accountability Office — the investigative arm of the US Congress — more oversight power over the Fed itself.

Amid US public anger at lavish bonuses paid out at firms the government saved from collapse, the measure provides for shareholders to hold non-binding annual votes on executive compensation, including severance packages known as “golden parachutes.”

The House and Senate must approve identical legislation in order to send it to Obama to sign into law.