Govt prepares for shutdown until April
The White House is asking agencies what impact the partial US government shutdown would have if it were extended until April as the Senate was due to vote on two rival bills to solve the crisis.
Several polls suggested that President Donald Trump was taking most of the blame for the closure of a quarter of government as the Democrats showed little sign of agreeing to his demand for US$5.7 billion (NZ$8.4b) to build a border wall with Mexico to solve the impasse. The Senate votes – one proposed by Republicans, which includes wall funding, and one from Democrats to reopen government for two weeks for further negotiations – come after Trump was forced into a climbdown.
He had initially refused to agree that his State of the Union address to Congress had become a casualty of the longest shutdown in US history. Trump accepted, however, that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker, had the right to withdraw the formal invitation for him to address the House of Representatives.
The move comes as 800,000 employees, including Secret Service agents, are due to miss a second fortnightly pay cheque today.
Federal workers will receive their pay after annual funding bills are agreed and government reopens but the sense of crisis deepened with the disclosure that Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, asked federal agencies to tell him what programmes could be endangered if the shutdown dragged on until March or April.
The impression that the Trump administration was insensitive to the impact on employees was heightened by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, 81, who told the business news channel CNBC that he did not understand why some unpaid federal workers went to food banks rather than take out loans against back pay guaranteed by a bill that Trump signed last week. Ross, reported to be worth US$700 million, said: ‘‘So the 30 days of pay that some people will be out, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be able to get a loan against it and we’ve seen a number of ads of financial institutions doing that.’’ Many banks and credit unions have offered low or nointerest loans against back pay.
Polling showed that most Americans oppose the shutdown. In a CBS poll, 70 per cent, including 43 per cent of Republicans, said that a border wall was not worth closing down the government. A survey for Associated Press showed that 60 per cent of respondents blamed Trump for the impasse compared with 31 per cent who blamed the Democrats. The poll found that the president’s approval rating had sunk by eight points in a month to 34 per cent.
A Hill-Harris poll reported that Trump’s approval rating had fallen for the third consecutive survey, to 44 per cent from 47 per cent at Christmas.
Dan Cox, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a centre-right think tank, said that one of the hallmarks of the Trump era had been the stability of his approval rating.
‘‘Since late December . . . there seems to be some movement in the negative direction for Trump,’’ he said. Trump has hailed as patriots those still working, with about 420,000 required to come in, including airport security staff and border patrol agents.
Airline pilots, air traffic controllers and flight attendants issued a statement saying that the shutdown had caused security and safety problems. ‘‘In our risk-averse industry we cannot calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break,’’ their associations said. ‘‘It is unprecedented.’’
Though neither bill was expected to be approved, some senators believe that they could pave the way towards a solution. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, told
‘‘Sometimes failure is a prelude to people saying, now we know what will fail, let’s try to devise something that will succeed.’’