The pain is deepening. But Republicans and Democrats are only becoming angrier and more estranged over a government shutdown with no end in sight.
The impasse is heading toward a third week, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo closed, and the nation’s air traffic control system becoming strained. An already acrimonious political duel took a nasty turn Friday night when the administration fired hundreds of bureaucrats to punish Democrats, although some dismissals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were hurriedly canceled.
Repercussions of the shutdown are getting more serious as a slow-boil crisis worsens. But so far, there’s no sign of a breakthrough, nor any serious talks between rival lawmakers on Capitol Hill to open the government.
Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a short-term bill to fund the government until Republicans extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year and agree to roll back President Donald Trump’s Medicaid cuts.
Republicans are willing to talk about extending the subsidies, since GOP members are also facing concern among their voters about Obamacare premiums that are set to skyrocket. But they say the government must reopen first.
An extreme lack of trust between the parties nine months into Trump’s turbulent second term is exacerbating the deadlock. But while those directly affected are experiencing great discomfort, this shutdown has not yet seized the national conversation. Voters may have priced in Congress’ habitual failure to do its job. Polls early in the shutdown suggested that more of them blamed Republicans for the impasse than Democrats. But neither side has yet landed a decisive political blow.
There’s also great competition for Americans’ attention. Trump left the country on Sunday for the Middle East on a victory lap as the ceasefire he negotiated between Israel and Hamas holds so far, cementing the major foreign achievement of his second presidency.
And it’s hard for the shutdown story to dominate because Trump ignites so many controversies. Last week, for instance, he escalated his campaign against political foes as former FBI chief James Comey appeared in court and a friendly prosecutor indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James. And Trump stepped up his bid to send troops to several major cities as he waged a legal battle with federal judges who ruled that he overstepped his authority.
The latest big developments
Two major developments could shift the political calculations in the coming week.
The administration sent out layoff notices to 4,000 government workers on Friday, seeking to turn the screw on Democratic Party leaders who’ve spent most of this year decrying Trump’s bid to gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, Trump announced that the Pentagon had unearthed research funding to repurpose to pay military personnel who faced going without wages this week.
Trump had previously warned he’d target bureaucrats working in areas favored by Democrats, although the administration held off for days on its threats amid fears on Capitol Hill that such a move might backfire. If nothing else, firing civil servants who’ve devoted their careers to public service just to make a political point is an extraordinary act of callousness by a government to its employees.
Democrats knew this was possible, but reason that Trump has been destroying thousands of federal jobs anyway. Still, rolling federal layoffs could eventually crank up pressure on Democrats to reconsider their position — and it raises the stakes for them to forge a significant victory to justify the disruption and the misery the shutdown is causing.
Trump’s claim that the layoffs would hurt only Democratic priorities, meanwhile, was undercut by the fact that many of the dismissals hammered the CDC, which has already been gutted by the Department of Government Efficiency and by the vaccine skeptic secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Disease doesn’t take any notice of political affiliation. And in chaos that is characteristic of this White House, over half of the dismissed staffers have already been reinstated. Those mistakenly fired in farcical scenes included Athalia Christie, the incident commander for the measles response. Incidence of the disease is now at its highest since measles was declared eliminated in America a quarter-century ago.
Trump’s decision to ensure military paychecks are not missed could also work both ways. On one hand, presidents always look good when taking care of the troops. But Trump’s move also eliminated one source of political heat on Democrats.
No one is talking, so they are just blaming one another
In the absence of genuine efforts to end the shutdown, top lawmakers on both sides stepped up efforts to dole out and escape blame on Sunday.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly criticized Trump’s federal layoffs and blasted the administration over health care. “He again is trying to politicize the federal government. … These are people with families, and they have mortgages and they have to pay rent,” Kelly told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
“They have to put food on the table. We have never seen a president do anything like this before,” the Arizona Democrat said.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kelly warned that Republicans would have to do more to get the government open than simply promising a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies by the end of the year. Kelly said Democrats wouldn’t accept a “vote without an assured outcome,” adding, “We need a real negotiation, and we need a fix.”
Democrats seem to have a strong argument. They could argue that Trump is shutting down the government and firing federal workers all to avoid giving Americans relief from soaring health costs. But a party still reeling from its 2024 election defeat lacks powerful public messengers. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for instance, last week seemed gleeful that his senators were holding together, and said, “Every day gets better for us.” The comment offered an opening for Republicans to claim the New York Democrat was inflicting pain on Americans for his own political gain.
Vice President JD Vance on Sunday insisted the administration was “happy to talk about health care policy, but not while the government is being held hostage.” Vance also claimed that the administration had no choice but to lay off some federal workers to ensure essential benefits were safe for other Americans amid the shutdown. This was disingenuous, since it has never been the case in previous shutdowns when workers were furloughed but did not lose their jobs.
Vance also tried to unload the anguish of workers fired by the administration in which he serves on Democrats. “You really have to ask yourself, ‘Who do we care more about? Federal bureaucrats in Washington, DC, or low-income women getting the food benefits they deserve, our troops getting the payment they need, flood insurance across the Southeast in the midst of hurricane season?’” Vance said on NBC.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, launched a counterattack on Democrats as he faces rising scrutiny over his refusal to recall the House. He accused the opposition party, with some justification, of seeing the shutdown as a way to at last show some fight against Trump after Senate Democrats caved ahead of a near shutdown in March. “Right now, they’re eating up the clock. They’re doing this for political cover,” Johnson said on “Fox News Sunday.”
One reason Johnson doesn’t want to recall the House could be a desire to avoid showcasing widening divisions between Republicans. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, a longtime Trump fan who has recently adopted an independent streak, has spoken about how her own family members are about to see their premiums shoot up. “Everyone’s just getting destroyed,” Greene told CNN last week.
There was more Republican discord on display when Rep. Kevin Kiley, an endangered member of the California delegation, said he couldn’t understand why the House was not in session.
“There’s no justification to shut everything down just because we’re in the midst of the government shutdown,” Kiley told Manu Raju on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
“In fact, the fact that there’s a government shutdown is all the more reason that we should be there in order to be doing everything we possibly can to get us out of this situation,” Kiley said.
Everyone is blaming one another, but there’s no momentum to get the government open. That won’t change until one party decides it has more political interest in reopening the government than keeping it closed.