Budget talks extended
Pence sticks to $5B for wall; Dems want detailed request
WASHINGTON — The government shutdown that has halted paychecks for hundreds of thousands of federal workers began its third week Saturday with no end in sight, as Vice President Mike Pence, top White House officials and senior congressional aides met for more than two hours without reaching a deal to reopen the government.
In the meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Pence refused to budge from the more than $5 billion that President Donald Trump has demanded from Congress to pay for a portion of his promised wall along the border with Mexico, according to two Democratic officials briefed on the negotiations.
The standoff, which has heavily affected national parks and other operations and threatens to halt payments as varied as food stamps and tax refunds, has made Trump’s unrealized border wall the linchpin of his presidency as he seeks to make good on a signature
campaign promise.
Administration officials have acknowledged that they were not prepared for the potential consequences of an extended shutdown and Trump’s decision to demand wall funding. Democrats, meanwhile, are standing firm on offering no taxpayer money for the project, which Trump had long asserted would be funded by Mexico.
Pence was deputized by Trump to oversee Saturday’s talks, but he did not have the president’s blessing to float new or specific numbers, as he did last month in a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., according to two Trump aides who were not authorized to speak publicly. That meant that few specifics were actually discussed Saturday, as Democratic staff members repeatedly pushed the administration to reopen the federal government and negotiate differences over the border after the shutdown ends.
The administration— represented by Pence, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and senior adviser Jared Kushner— refused, according to officials.
“Not much headway made today,” Trump tweeted Saturday afternoon. “Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!”
Saturday morning before the meeting, Trump took a combative tone in several Twitter messages and claimed that news coverage documenting cracks in Republican support for his hard-line position was inaccurate.
“Great support coming from all sides for Border Security (including Wall) on our very dangerous Southern Border,” Trump tweeted. “Teams negotiating this weekend! Washington Post and NBC reporting of events, including Fake sources, has been very inaccurate (to put it mildly)!”
A number of Republicans, including Sen. Cory Gardner, R-colo., who is up for re-election in 2020, have said in recent days that the government should be reopened and a shutdown is not the “right answer,” worrying GOP leaders about the depth of support for Trump’s position.
Trump spent much of Saturday on the phone with allies, talking through his positioning on the shutdown and hearing their reviews of his Friday news conference in the Rose Garden, according to a person close to him. Two people regularly on his call list— Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.— have encouraged Trump to hold fast and refuse to agree to reopen the government unless wall funding is secured, the person said.
“I’ve never seen the president as resolved on any issue as he is on this,” Meadows said Saturday. “But he is open to new ideas about how to end the impasse.”
In conversations with top aides on Friday and Saturday, House Democratic leaders said Trump and GOP leaders seem eager to be seen as making progress even if the talks remained stalled, allowing Republican lawmakers back home over the weekend to reassure nervous constituents, according to two Democratic officials briefed on those discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
“There is the reality of what the White House is doing, which is very little, and the image they’re trying to send, which is, ‘Look at us, we’re busy, and the vice president is rolling up his sleeves,’” one Democratic official said. “They’re worried about defections.”
During Saturday’s meeting, Democratic staff members asked the White House to lay out in formal detail the administration’s funding request for the border, including its specific security requests, what the money would be used for, and what in the Homeland Security budget the administration would cut to make the numbers work, people familiar with the meeting said.
Democrats “emphasized that it’s important for us to have an updated budget request from the White House because they have been all over the map,” said another official briefed on the discussion. The White House plans to provide those figures before the group meets again Sunday afternoon.