US Government Shuts Down as Talks Fail to Break Impasse

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, The New York Times reported.

Any hope of a compromise ended about 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 on Saturday.

A burst of late-afternoon activity could not break the deadlock, even as Vice President Mike Pence met with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and senior House Republicans, searching for a solution to a logjam that Trump has shown little interest in breaking.

While the president 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.

Late Friday, as his budget director ordered the carrying out of shutdown plans, President 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 will 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 to 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 wall on the southwestern border.

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.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and 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.

In his Friday night 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.”