The deadlock in Washington continued Wednesday, after the government hurtled to shut down at midnight, as senators once again rejected competing stopgap funding bills as they returned to work on Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers failed to pass a GOP-drafted short-term extension in a 55-45 vote, with three Democratic senators voting “yes”, and breaking ranks with their party to join Republicans. This version would keep the government funded until 21 November. Only one Republican, senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted “no”.
Earlier, all Republicans in the upper chamber opposed a continuing resolution drafted by congressional Democrats in a 47-53 vote. This bill would stave off a government shutdown until the end of October, and extends Affordable Care Act subsidies which are due to expire at the end of the year.
Republicans, which control the Senate and the House of Representatives, have repudiated Democrats’ demands, setting off a legislative scramble that lasted into the hours before funding lapsed at midnight, when the Senate failed to advance both parties’ bills to keep funding going.
At the White House Wednesday, JD Vance continued to lay blame for the lapse in government funding squarely at congressional Democrats’ feet.
“The reason why the American people’s government is shutdown is because Chuck Schumer is listening to the far left radicals in his own party,” the vice-president said, referring to the top Senate Democrat.
The shutdown is the first since a 35-day closure that began in December 2018 and extended into the new year, during Trump’s first term. It comes as Democrats look to regain their footing with voters, who re-elected Trump last year and relegated them to the minority in both chambers of Congress.
Schumer, said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show on Wednesday that his party had shown Trump and the Republicans that they would not be bullied. “They thought they could bludgeon us without even one bit of consultation … let’s sit down and try to come to an agreement that protects the American people.”
He said that the Republican strategy was to lie to the American people with false talking points that Democrats wanted to give healthcare benefits to undocumented immigrants. “It’s a total absolute effing lie,” he said, adding: “They are afraid of the truth, they know that what they have done has decimated healthcare for 20 million Americans.”
Last month, House Republicans passed a bill that would fund the government through 21 November, but it requires the support of some Democrats to clear the 60-vote threshold for advancement in the Senate. It failed to gain that support in votes held late on Tuesday, while Republicans also blocked a Democratic proposal to continue funding through October while also making an array of policy changes.
“Far-left interest groups and far-left Democrat members wanted to show down with the president, and so Senate Democrats have sacrificed the American people to Democrats’ partisan interests,” Senate majority leader John Thune said.
The White House has responded to the shutdown threat by announcing plans to fire federal workers en masse if funding lapses. “When you shut it down, you have to do layoffs, so we’d be laying off a lot of people,” Donald Trump said earlier on Tuesday, adding: “They’re going to be Democrats.”
Shortly after the failed votes, Russ Vought, director of the White House office of management and budget, released a letter blaming “Democrats’ insane policy demands” for a shutdown. “It is unclear how long Democrats will maintain their untenable posture, making the duration of the shutdown difficult to predict,” Vought wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the heads of federal offices and agencies.
Democrats have demanded an extension of premium tax credits for ACA plans, which expire at the end of the year. They also want to undo Republican cuts to Medicaid and public media outlets, while preventing Trump’s use of a “pocket rescission” to further gut foreign aid.
The total cost of those provisions is expected to hit $1tn, while about 10 million people are set to lose healthcare due to the Medicaid cuts, as well as to changes to the ACA. Without an extension of the tax credits for premiums, health insurance prices will rise for about 20 million people.
Moments after the government shut down, former US vice-president Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who lost to Donald Trump in the 2024 election, posted on X: “President Trump and Congressional Republicans just shut down the government because they refused to stop your health care costs from rising. Let me be clear: Republicans are in charge of the White House, House, and Senate. This is their shutdown.”
The progressive Democratic representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said on MSNBC that Trump was playing a “bluffing game” in which he was holding the federal workforce hostage and threatening to fire everybody.
“We have to stop enabling their abuse of power. When we’re fighting on health care, it forces them to act in accordance with the law in other ways too … They want us to blink first, and we have too much to save,” she said.
While Thune has said he would be willing to negotiate over extending the ACA credits, he insists new government funding be approved first.
Democratic leaders say they are not backing down, but signs have emerged of dissent within their ranks. Three members of the Democratic caucus voted for the Republican proposal on Tuesday evening – two more than when the bill was first considered earlier this month.
Democrats who broke with their party indicated they did so out of concern for what the Trump administration might do when the government shuts down.
“I cannot support a costly shutdown that would hurt Nevada families and hand even more power to this reckless administration,” said Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto.
Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, called the vote “one of the most difficult” of his Senate career, but said: “The paradox is by shutting the government we’re actually giving Donald Trump more power, and that was why I voted yes.”
Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, the sole Democrat to vote for the Republican funding bill when it was first considered a week and a half ago, supported it once again, saying: “My vote was for our country over my party. Together, we must find a better way forward.”
While the party that instigates a shutdown has historically failed to achieve their goals, polls have given mixed verdicts on how the public views the Democrats’ tactics.
A New York Times/Siena poll found that only 27% of respondents said the Democrats should shut down the government. Among Democrats, the split was 47% in favor of a shutdown and 43% against, while 59% of independents were opposed.
A Marist poll released on Tuesday found that 38% of voters would blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown, 27% would blame the Democrats and 31% both parties.
Republican senator Ted Cruz – an architect of a 2013 shutdown intended to defund the ACA – described Democrats’s shutdown threat as a “temper tantrum” that would go nowhere.
“They’re trying to show … that they hate Trump,” Cruz told reporters. “It will end inevitably in capitulation.”
On top of the expected furloughing of 750,000 federal workers, another 150,000 workers this week are expected to leave the payroll after agreeing to buyouts earlier this year as Trump sent in the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) under Elon Musk to slash the workforce. The 1 million worker total amounts to the largest single-year exodus of civil servants in nearly 80 years, according to Reuters.
