White House pulls back on threat of shutdown
The Trump administration quietly tells Congress it won’t insist on wall funding in budget stopgap.
The White House has signaled to congressional Republicans that it will not shut down the government in October if money isn’t appropriated to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, potentially clearing a path for lawmakers to reach a short-term budget deal.
Congress has only appropriated money to fund government operations through the end of September, and President Donald Trump has threatened to shut down the government if lawmakers don’t include $1.6 billion in new funding so that 74 new miles of wall and secondary fencing can be added to the border.
But White House officials quietly notified Congress Aug. 24 that the $1.6 billion would not need to be in a “continuing resolution” that was meant to fund government operations from October until sometime in early December, a senior GOP congressional aide said.
White House officials have signaled to lawmakers that the wall’s eventual construction remains a top priority for Trump, and he wants the funding included in the December budget bill, GOP congressional aides said.
This marks the second time he has pulled back from the wall demand to allow lawmakers to pass a budget bill. The first time came in May, when lawmakers voted to authorize government funding through September and refrained from including money that would allow for the construction of a new wall. That law, however, did allow the U.S. government to replace existing border wall with a new barrier where necessary.
Trump has been threatening to shut down the government for months. In May, he said in another tweet that the government needed a “good shutdown” to break the gridlock in Congress.
Trump and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney have stressed repeatedly to Congress that the wall money must be appropriated, and the House approved a bill in late July that would fund the government and included $1.6 billion for the wall construction. But the Senate refused to take up that bill, in part because Senate GOP leaders knew Democrats would not support it and they needed Democratic backing to bring a new spending measure up for a vote.
There were other worries. Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling by Sept. 29, or Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has warned that he might not have enough flexibility to pay all of the government’s bill. Because those deadlines were so close, Mnuchin and other White House officials did not want a fight over the budget to become entangled with a measure to raise the debt ceiling.