Government shuts down overnight
Talks set to continue today as Trump insists on border wall
WASHINGTON — The federal government shut down early Saturday after congressional and White House officials failed to find a compromise on a spending bill that hinged on President Donald Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion for a border wall. It is the third shutdown in two years of unified Republican rule in Washington, and it will stop work at nine federal departments and several other agencies.
Hundreds of thousands of government employees are affected.
Any hope of a compromise ended around 8:30 p.m. Friday, when both the House and the Senate had adjourned with no solution in sight. Talks are expected to begin again Saturday.
A burst of late-afternoon activity could not break the deadlock even as Vice President Mike Pence met with
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, and senior House Republicans, searching for a solution to a logjam that Trump has shown little interest in breaking.
Late Friday, as his budget director ordered the carrying out of government shutdown plans, Trump told the country in a video on Twitter that “we’re going to have a shutdown.
“There’s nothing we can do about that because we need the Democrats to give us their votes,” he said in the video.
As in previous government shutdowns, it would not affect core government functions like the Postal Service, the military, the Department of Veterans Affairs and entitlement programs,
including Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps.
But about 380,000 workers would be sent home and would not be paid. Another 420,000 considered too essential to be furloughed would be forced, like the Border Patrol officers, to work without pay.
The Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior — which includes national parks — Justice, State, Transportation and Treasury would all be affected. NASA would also be hit.
There had been a glimmer of progress late in the day when the Senate voted, 48-47, with Pence breaking a tie, to begin debating stopgap spending legislation passed Thursday night by the House that would keep the government running through Feb. 8 and provide $5.7 billion to begin construction of the border wall.
But the vote was more a repudiation of Trump’s proposal than an endorsement of it. Senators in both parties conceded that the measure could not pass the chamber, where major legislation requires bipartisan support, and said they were advancing it only to allow negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders in both parties to proceed on a compromise that all sides could accept.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, said the Senate had approved the measure “in order to preserve maximum flexibility for productive conversations to continue between the White House and our Democratic colleagues.”
Schumer said the vote only underscored what Democrats had been telling Trump since last week, when the president declared during a combative Oval Office meeting that he would be proud to shut down the government and shoulder the blame if he could not win support to fund his border wall.
“His wall does not have 60 votes here in the Senate, let alone 50 votes — that much is now clear,” Schumer said. “We are willing to continue discussions” on proposals to keep the government funded, he added.
While Trump has been unwilling to consider dropping his demand to fund his signature campaign promise, Pence and other White House officials were discussing a number of potential compromises that would force him to do just that, omitting spending on a wall and instead adding money for other security measures at the border, according to several officials with knowledge of the talks.
And in his video, Trump appeared to be moderating his position slightly, calling for “great border security with a wall, or a slat fence, or whatever you want to call it — but we need a great barrier.”
“Let’s be bipartisan and let’s get it done,” Trump said. “The shutdown hopefully will not last long.”
It was an appropriate end to a period of unified Republican rule of the White House and both chambers of Congress that has been marked by dysfunction and infighting, a mercurial president whose shifting positions and whims have scuttled legislative deals, and Republican leaders and lawmakers who cower at the prospect of angering his core supporters.
Negotiations continued among White House and congressional officials Friday night after Pence left a quiet Capitol, with the talks expected to continue Saturday, but there was no clear sense of where they might lead. The House and Senate remained on standby, planning to reconvene but devoid for the moment of any measure that would reopen the government and bridge the divide.
The vote unfolded as Pence, along with Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director and incoming chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, huddled in the Capitol to jump-start negotiations. The prospect of a deal has been hampered by the president’s refusal to budge on the wall, or to indicate what alternatives he would be willing to accept to keep the government open.
Among the options discussed behind closed doors were proposals that would allocate $1.6 billion to $2.5 billion to border security, none of which could be spent on a wall. But it was not clear that conservatives in the House, who insisted Thursday on adding $5.7 billion for the physical barrier the president has demanded to the stopgap spending measure, would back that solution.