Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who is now serving in a powerful role at Trump’s department of homeland security, said it was “shameful” that Puerto Rican super star Bad Bunny, a longtime critic of Donald Trump, was headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, Variety reports.
“It’s so shameful they’ve decided to pick somebody who seems to hate America so much to represent them at the Halftime Show,” Lewandowski said in an interview with Benny Johnson.
Johnson, a conservative commenter, described Bad Bunny as an “anti-ICE activist” on Instagram, the Associated Press reported. On his show today, Variety reported, Johnson asked Lewandowski if Ice would have enforcement at the Super Bowl.
Lewandowski replied that Ice agents do enforcement everywhere. “There is nowhere you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally. Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else,” he said, according to Variety.
“If there are illegal aliens, I don’t care if it’s a concert for Johnny Smith or Bad Bunny or anybody else. … We’re going to do enforcement everywhere.”
Employees within HHS told to 'set an OOO email blaming Democrats - report
Employees at an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services “were told to set an out-of-office message in their email accounts blaming Democrats” for the government shutdown, according to an email obtained by HuffPost.
It’s another example of the Trump administration using mainstream government resources to make targeted partisan attacks. As HuffPost notes, federal government employees have been barred since 1939 from using their jobs for political activity under the Hatch Act.
“The law’s purposes are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.” a federal website still notes.
Updated
Donald Trump got a significant amount of blame during the last partial government shutdown, which took place toward the end of his first term after he forced a shutdown over border wall funding — but with Democrats embracing the shutdown fight this time, the outcome could be very different, the Associated Press reports.
Democrats in Congress had demanded an extension to expiring health care benefits in order to pass the bill to extend government funding. (See my colleague Chris Stein’s recent analysis: ‘A righteous fight.’) Republicans in Congress had refused, but offered a stopgap bill to keep the government open for several weeks, which Democrats rejected.
A New York Times/Siena poll conducted last week, prior to the shutdown, shows that two-thirds of registered voters did not want Democrats to shut down the government if their demands were not met, although both parties could end up receiving some blame for the resulting closure.
About one-quarter of registered voters in the Times/Siena poll — which was conducted prior to the shutdown — said they would blame Trump and the Republicans in Congress if a shutdown happened, while about 2 in 10 said they would place blame on congressional Democrats. About one-third said they’d blame both sides equally.
The state department has updated the government shutdown banner on its website to join the list of government department sites bearing a partisan message. It reads: “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.” As I reported this morning, it didn’t say that earlier.
The US Forest Service also has one now that reads (with some grammatical issues): “The Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government. This government website will be updated periodically during the funding lapse for mission critical functions. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”
White House fires much of the National Council on the Humanities
The White House has abruptly fired a large share of the council members advising the National Endowment for the Humanities, retaining only four Trump appointees, the Washington Post (paywall) is reporting citing terminated members and an updated list of scholars on the agency’s website.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Council on the Humanities is terminated, effective immediately,” read an email sent to council members this morning, reviewed by the paper. “Thank you for your service.” It was signed by Mary Sprowls of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.
The board of 26 scholars and humanities leaders is appointed by the president to six-year terms. It advises its chair on grantmaking, policy and funding decisions. Before the government shutdown, members were scheduled to attend a special meeting next week to review statue proposals for Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes”, one terminated board member told the Post.
By late this morning, the council’s website had been updated to show only four members, all appointed by Trump: Russell A. Berman, Keegan F. Callanan, William English and Matthew Rose. Two of the terminated member were also Trump appointees.
Analysis: ‘A righteous fight’: Democrats hold fast on healthcare but also use shutdown to pummel Trump
Finally, after nine months of Donald Trump running rampant over much in the government they hold dear, Democrats in Congress have found the ground on which to fight.
Pressed to vote for a Republican plan to keep the government open through mid-November, Democrats balked, and instead laid out a series of demands that amounted to the undoing of much of what the GOP has accomplished over the past year.
It was a nonstarter for Republicans and, after days of bluster and fruitless voting, the government tipped into a shutdown just after midnight on Wednesday. For Democrats, that may have been the point – pummeled by voters last November, the party has been looking for opportunities to remake its case to Americans.
“This is a righteous fight. There is no fight better than this fight right now,” said Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren on a live stream with other Democratic senators convened shortly before the chamber’s final, futile votes on Tuesday evening.
On the surface, Democrats are waging a battle over healthcare, long a signature cause for the party. They want cuts to Medicaid that Republicans approved earlier this year reversed, along with premium tax credits for health plans under the Affordable Care Act – the signature Barack Obama achievement and constant Republican target – extended, funding to public media outlets like PBS and NPR restored, and a prohibition on Trump’s backdoor attempts to cut foreign aid.
But it is also about standing up to a president whom they see as uniquely dangerous, at a time when he may be especially vulnerable. Trump’s approval ratings are well underwater, lower than even Joe Biden’s at this point in his term. Inflation has not been quelled in the way the president promised it would, while the job market is looking shaky. And the issue of free speech – dominated in recent years by Republicans who have railed against “cancel culture” – appears up for grabs by Democrats, after Trump and his officials demonized those who did not toe their line on Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist.
“People are going to get hurt by a shutdown, but they’re also going to get hurt if their premiums go up by 75% when everything else is going up, the cost of car repairs, the cost of food, the cost of school supplies,” the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said. “And people are going to get hurt by a government that’s … lawless, because if you can’t speak your mind in this country without repercussions, that comes with a cost as well.”
You can read the rest of Chris’s analysis here:
With the Senate set to leave this afternoon and still be gone tomorrow to observe Yom Kippur, the government shutdown will last until at least Friday (though likely longer, as a funding compromise hasn’t yet materialised). Voting is expected to continue on Friday and Saturday. The House, meanwhile, won’t return until next week.
Updated
After weeks of threats from both sides and negotiations that went nowhere, the US is once again experiencing a government shutdown. For this week’s edition of our excellent Politics Weekly America podcast, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Marianna Sotomayor, a congressional reporter at the Washington Post, to look at who should take the blame, who suffers, and who will blink first.
You can listen to the episode here:
On that topic of the conversation Republicans and Democrats were seen having on the Senate floor earlier this afternoon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has told NBC News that “there is a lot of bipartisan hope that we can make this shutdown as short and costless as possible.
Peter Welch of Vermont added that Chuck Schumer is “very supportive of members having conversations with colleagues”. “This is a point where rank-and-file members should be talking,” Welch said.
New Mexico’s Ben Ray Luján also told NBC that as long as members are talking, “there’s always a chance for a solution”.
“I’ve seen moments where people thought that there was an impasse on whatever the policy was and snap the fingers, there’s a solution, there’s a resolution,” Luján said. “People work together and get it done.”
Group of bipartisan senators seeking way out of shutdown
As the Senate this afternoon voted on the Republican proposal to restart government funding, a bipartisan knot of lawmakers could be seen discussing something on the chamber floor.
It was a good indication that lawmakers were looking for a way out of the funding lapse, which carries risks for both parties, not to mention Americans writ large.
Shortly after the votes concluded, South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds, who was spotted among the group, indicated that a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution (CR), may be under discussion.
Democrats “want to address a number of issues in a CR, all of which can be done during the regular appropriations process, which a 45-day CR would give us time to complete,” Rounds wrote on X, and referred to the minority’s demand to continue enhanced tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plan premiums.
“Republicans will work with Democrats on this issue, but not until we get government reopened again,” he said.
Only time will tell if this is an actual concrete sign of a deal being reached to reopen the government. Party leaders have not changed their demands since the shutdown began at 12.01am ET.
Speaking to reporters at the briefing earlier, JD Vance engaged in whataboutism, claiming that it is Democrats who are lying.
“If you look at the legislative text that [Democrats] gave us, they tried to turn on two separate provisions that would give healthcare benefits to illegal aliens,” he said. “It’s a lie told by the Democrats that they’re not trying to give healthcare benefits to illegal aliens.”
The vice-president also continued his attack on Chuck Schumer, suggesting this all comes down to politics in New York state. “The reality here, and let’s be honest about the politics, is that Chuck Schumer is terrified he’s going to get a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said.
He went on: “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 because he’s terrified of a primary challenge.
“So I’d invite Chuck Schumer to join the moderate Democrats and 52 Senate Republicans and do the right thing, open up the people’s government and then let’s fix healthcare policy for the American people.”
Vance then took questions from reporters and claimed “it’s obviously a Democratic shutdown”, not a Republican one.
Peter Doocy of Fox News noted that Republicans are claiming Democrats want to fund healthcare for illegal immigrants, and Democrats say this is a lie, which portends a long shutdown.
The vice-president replied: “I can’t predict what congressional Democrats are going to do, Peter, but I actually don’t think it’s going to be that long of a shutdown. This is just the guess of the vice-president of the United States because I think you already saw some evidence that moderate Democrats are cracking. They understand the fundamental illogic.”
Trump administration scraps $8bn for climate-related projects in 16 states led by Democrats
Despite JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt being sparse on details about what is going to be cut amid the government shutdown, White House budget director Russell Vought has just announced another one.
The Trump administration is cancelling nearly $8bn in climate-related funding targeting projects in 16 US states, including California and New York, Vought said on X.
Calling the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda”, he lists the affected states (all of them are blue): “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA”
Details of the cancellations will come from the US energy department, Vought added.
Updated
White House warns layoffs are imminent if shutdown drags on
Leavitt tells reporters that government agencies are already preparing for cuts and “layoffs are imminent”.
“Unfortunately, because the Democrats shut down the government, the president has directed his cabinet and the Office of Management and Budget is working with agencies across the board to identify where cuts can be made and we believe that layoffs are imminent,” she says.
Leavitt says the Trump administration will soon announce another nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a day after withdrawing the nomination of conservative economist EJ Antoni.
“EJ Antoni remains a great ally of the president and our team. It became clear, unfortunately, that he was not going to have the votes, and so we will be announcing a replacement nominee very soon,” she says.
Leavitt says there are “sensitive discussions” taking place over Donald Trump’s proposal to end the war in Gaza but doesn’t comment further.
The president gave Hamas “three or four days” to accept the proposal, otherwise he would fully back Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza.
CNN is now also reporting that White House budget chief Russell Vought warned a group of House Republicans that some permanent layoffs of federal workers would take effect in “one to two” days, citing four people on the call.
CNN reports that Vought didn’t offer clarity on which federal workers could see layoffs or how many people could be affected, but signaled that the administration would start with agencies that fall outside their priorities, the people said.
The New York Times has heard similar.
As we’ve been reporting this comes in the context of Vought and others in the Trump administration warning that they would use their powers during a shutdown to further shrink the size of the federal government to reflect the White House’s agenda.
Vought also warned that a popular federal safety net program for mothers and young children – called WIC – will run out of money by next week, according to CNN’s sources.
Updated
Leavitt takes over again.
She says there are unfortunate consequences to a shutdown and decisions about what needs to come to an end are being made and layoffs are going to be part of that.
Updated
Asked about Jeffries saying the meme Trump posted of him was racist, Vance says: “I don’t even know what that means”.
He goes on to say he’s sure people know the moustache and hair were not real. Which … wasn’t the point being made.
Updated
Asked about Trump posting the AI-generated memes of Hakeem Jeffries, including one video falsely depicting the House minority leader with a curly moustache and a sombrero, which Jeffries has denounced as racist, Vance says:
I think it’s funny. The president is joking, and we’re having a good time. You can negotiate in good faith, while also poking a little bit of fun at some of the absurdities of the Democrats’ positions and even poking fun at the Democrats themselves.
Vance then addressed Jeffries directly, saying:
I make the solemn promise to you that if you help us reopen the government, the sombrero memes will stop.
He added: “I talked to the president of the United States about that.”
Updated
Federal layoffs to go into effect 'in next day or two' - report
In this afternoon’s conference call with House Republicans, Russell Vought, the budget director, has told members that the reduction-in-force plans would go into effect in the next day or two, the New York Times is reporting, citing a lawmaker on the call.
And slightly contradicting what Vance just said, the NYT’s report adds that Vought framed the shutdown as an opportunity for the administration to get rid of what the White House sees as unnecessary bureaucrats, especially in programs that do not align with Donald Trump’s agenda. He also discussed the possibility of passing a bill to pay troops.
Updated
Vance says no final decisions made on layoffs but government will prioritise 'essential services'
The vice-president says they haven’t made any final decisions regarding layoffs or furloughs, but adds that layoffs will be expected if the shutdown drags on for another few days or weeks.
We are going to have to lay people off. We’re gonna have to save money in some places so the essential services don’t get turned off in other places. That is the reality of the government shutdown that Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have foisted upon the administration.
Updated
Vance denies the administration will target federal workers based on their politics
Vance denies that the Trump administration would target federal workers for layoffs based on their politics.
Asked about Trump suggesting yesterday that the administration has asked agencies to target federal workers whom they believe are Democrats, he says:
We’re not targeting federal agencies based on politics. We’re targeting the people’s government so that as much as possible of the essential services can continue to function.
Vance says he doesn't think the shutdown will be that long
Back to Vance, he says “I actually don’t think it’s going to be that long of a shutdown” citing “some evidence that moderate Democrats are cracking a little bit”.
The Democrats who crossed party lines today to vote for the GOP’s stopgap funding bill are the same ones who voted for it yesterday.
Furthermore, while Medicaid may help cover emergency care at hospitals for undocumented immigrants who would otherwise qualify for the program, this is not health insurance coverage.
Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill also reduced the amount that hospitals receive for those services in states that expanded Medicaid, but it did not eliminate funding altogether.
Less than 1% of total Medicaid spending went toward emergency Medicaid for undocumented immigrants in fiscal year 2023, according to healthcare non-profit KFF.
Updated
Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill also narrowed eligibility for Obamacare subsidies for certain “lawfully present” immigrants.
The Democrats’ proposal would restore that eligibility. This again has nothing to do with undocumented immigrants.
Updated
In fact, the Democrats are pushing to continue enhanced federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage and to reverse deep cuts to Medicaid contained in Trump’s sweeping tax and spending package signed in July.
Neither of those changes would provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants, since they aren’t eligible for either program.
Updated
A reminder that undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal health insurance programs Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. They also cannot buy health care plans on government exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act and therefore cannot receive any subsidies.
The Democrats have not proposed to change this.
Updated
Vance repeats the GOP claim that they are willing to have the conversation about healthcare, but the Democrats have taken the government “hostage”.
Proof that the messaging war over the government shutdown is getting serious. The White House have wheeled out vice-president JD Vance to the podium for today’s press briefing.
Vance quickly launched into a falsehood as he played the blame game.
He said:
The reason your government is shut down at this very minute is because, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans and even a few moderate Democrats supported opening the government, the Chuck Schumer-AOC wing of the Democratic party shut down the government because they said to us, we will open the government only if you give billions of dollars of funding to healthcare for illegal aliens. That’s a ridiculous proposition.
Updated
Karoline Leavitt is speaking now. She is accompanied by JD Vance who will also deliver remarks.
She starts off by blaming Democrats for the government shutdown and says that if they cared about healthcare, they would applaud Trump’s measures to lower healthcare costs since he took office, like the deal he announced yesterday with Pfizer to lower prescription drug prices.
Updated
Following today’s decision by the supreme court to keep Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, in her position for the time being, I’ve been speaking to professor Carl Tobias at the University of Richmond School of Law.
He said that both the decision to keep Cook in place, as well as the court’s announcement today that they’ll hear oral arguments in the merits of the case in January, are “good signs for both sides”.
“It does protect the independence of the Fed, at least in the short term,” Tobias added. “The one big question is even if they have arguments in January, when will they issue the ruling? That could come early, because I expect the government will ask them to expedite everything, but it could be as late as June.”
Tobias also noted that the supreme court’s decision to maintain the status quo in the short term, is also positive to allow the markets to “settle down” and mitigate uncertainty.
One key point Tobias made was that if the supreme court ultimately decides that Cook can stay in her role until the end of her term, it’s “less clear” what precedent this sets writ large.
He cited recent decisions by the court which kept the Trump administration’s firings of political appointees at independent agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), in place.
GOP's House-passed funding bill fails again in the Senate
Earlier this afternoon, the Senate failed to advance Republicans’ stopgap funding bill once again in a 55-45 vote after most Democrats voted against it.
The GOP needed 60 votes to pass the bill that would fund the government for another seven weeks until 21 November, which would require at least seven Democratic votes if all Republicans supported it.
Three Democrats crossed party lines to support the measure as they did last night: Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Angus King of Maine. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to vote against.
Updated
White House press briefing
The White House is due to hold a press briefing in the any minute now. We’ll have coverage of course and also some useful fact-checking and context where needed.
It’s been a day of very heavy partisan commentary from Republicans and Democrats against the backdrop of the political crisis and national chaos of a federal government shutdown.
There is likely to be some fierce back and forth in the west wing as select media question White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Stay tuned.
Updated
White House freezes $18bn in NYC infrastructure funding
White House budget director Russell Vought has said that the Trump administration is putting on hold billions of dollars of funding for two major construction projects in New York City, on day one of the federal government shut down.
“Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” Vought wrote on X.
“Specifically, the Hudson Tunnel Project and the Second Ave Subway,” he added in a second post. He said the Department of Transportation would release more details on the pause.
The announcement would – incidentally - dramatically affect major projects for the home state and city of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Earlier this morning, House speaker Mike Johnson said Democrats had handed the Trump administration “the keys to the kingdom” and said Vought would now be able to decide “what services are essential, what programs and policies should be continued, and which would not be a priority for taxpayers”.
Vought, who is due to brief House Republicans at 1pm ET, told Fox Business yesterday that the government has the authority to “make permanent change to the bureaucracy”, such as cutting jobs and programs rather than just furloughing government workers. He said:
There are all manner of authorities to be able to keep this administration’s policy agenda moving forward, and that includes reducing the size and scope of the federal government, and we will be looking for the opportunities to do that. We have the authority to make permanent change to the bureaucracy here in government.
Supreme Court leaves Federal Reserve governor Cook in place for now
Lisa Cook, the US Federal Reserve governor, will keep her job for now, despite Donald Trump’s extraordinary bid to remove her from the central bank’s board with immediate effect.
The US supreme court deferred action on the Department of Justice’s request to allow the president to fire Cook, at least until it hears oral arguments on the case in January.
Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign to exert greater control over the Fed, publicly lambasting the US central bank over its decisions, installing a close ally on its board of governors and attempting to fire Cook.
His battle for influence has raised questions over the independence of the Fed, which for decades has steered the US economy without political interference. Read more here.
Here is an ICYMI, yesterday longtime Democratic US Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois turned down what had been a forthcoming honor from the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago to mark his long history of campaigning for immigration reform in the US, to bring about a fairer system for people to gain rights to get legal status in the US.
Durbin withdrew after a fight blew up among church chiefs in Illinois, because of Durbin’s support for abortion rights.
Pope Leo, who is from Chicago, was asked about the kerfuffle over the award, when talking with reporters in Italy yesterday. That ended up with the pope slamming Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, with Leo questioning whether they were in line with the Catholic church’s “pro-life” teachings.
“Someone who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” the pontiff said. You can read more on that here.
Durbin announced in April that he will not seek re-election in 2026, after almost 30 years in the congressional upper chamber.
Summary
Just over 12 hours into the first US federal government shutdown in almost seven years, there is no shortage of partisan political recriminations and chaos and no solution in sight. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court has made an important decision, so stick with us for all the news as it happens.
Here’s where things stand:
No resolution. The US Senate just voted 47-53, with all Republicans opposed, to reject a Democrats’ proposal to fund the government. It required 60 votes to pass. The congressional upper chamber is now voting on the House-passed Republican short-term spending bill, which also needs 60 votes to pass and is also expected to fail.
The White House website has had a shutdown makeover to ram home the Trump administration’s claim that “Democrats have shut down the government”. It even features a ticking clock illustrating duration of the shutdown so far.
The House of Representatives will not return to Washington until next week, speaker Mike Johnson has announced, as the deadlock over the shutdown is set to persist.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, defended the fact that the Democrats did not engineer a shutdown earlier in the Trump administration, when the GOP was more willing to talk. “They did not negotiate at all this time,” he said.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said Schumer has “handed the keys of the kingdom” to the executive branch to “downsize the scope and scale” of the government. He predicted a “pretty massive backfire” for Democrats.
A government shutdown raises questions about how the Environmental Protection Agency can carry out its mission of protecting the America’s health and environment with little more than skeletal staff and funding.
Former US vice president Kamala Harris posted online a few minutes after the shutdown began: “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.”
A US federal government shutdown was triggered after a deadline to reach a funding agreement before the start of the new fiscal year, on 1 October, came and went without a deal.
Updated
Senate votes down Democratic continuing resolution
The Senate just voted 47-53, with all Republicans opposed, to reject the Democrats’ counterproposal to fund the government. It required 60 votes to pass.
The upper chamber is now voting on the House-passed Republican short-term spending bill, which also needs 60 votes to pass and is also expected to fail.
Updated
A reader has helpfully flagged another issue with the White House website’s ticking shutdown clock page.
At the time of writing, while the banner at the top of the screen has the shutdown as having gone on for 11 hours 32 minutes – reflecting Eastern Daylight Time – the ticking digital clock appears to be in a different time zone, saying 10 hours 32 minutes.
Updated
Ticking clock on White House website blames Democrats for government shutdown
In an astonishing development, the White House website has had a shutdown makeover to ram home the Trump administration’s claim that “Democrats have shut down the government”.
It even features a ticking clock illustrating how long the shutdown has been going on for. The clock was first launched yesterday to count down the minutes to the impending shutdown last night.
The website further claims “Americans Don’t Agree with Democrats’ Actions” and has a compiled list of statements from organizations that supposedly demonstrate this point.
But bar a handful from conservative-aligned organizations, most of the quotes selected actually don’t blame Democrats at all; they simply illustrate the impact that a government shutdown would have on various organizations and programs – and call for one to be avoided.
Updated
The House will return to DC next week, Johnson says
The House will return to Washington next week, speaker Mike Johnson has announced, as the government shutdown has no end in sight.
“Yes, the House will be returning next week, and they would be here this week, except that we did our work,” Johnson told reporters during a press conference this morning.
House GOP leadership decided to cancel planned votes and keep the House in recess this week to put maximum pressure on Senate Democrats to accept Republicans’ plan to fund the government.
Johnson said that he does not plan to call the House back on Friday. “There is nothing truly that we can do much on the floor while the lights are almost literally out here. We have to open the government,” he said.
Updated
In short, no sign of movement from either side.
Thune said he was not interested in linking negotiations on health care policy to government funding. “Everybody’s now asking the question, ‘How does this end?’ It ends when Senate Democrats pick this bill up passed by the House of Representatives and vote for it.”
Thune reiterates his view that the Democrats are “holding the federal government hostage to their partisan demands” and says Republicans will not engage on bipartisan discussions while that’s ongoing.
Updated
Senate majority leader John Thune is speaking now. He says immediately that “Democrats have bowed to the far left and shut down the government”.
Schumer said that if Republicans worked with them to fix the healthcare crisis, “the shutdown could go away very quickly”.
“That’s what Democrats want, to end this now, fix healthcare now,” he said.
Calling Trump “the most immature president we’ve ever had”, Schumer said that “instead of acting like an adult” and doing something about the healthcare crisis, Trump “is threatening to hurt countless hardworking Americans”.
Updated
Schumer said: “When Democrats say we want to work with Republicans to lower premiums to strengthen healthcare, all we are doing is reflecting what the American people already want. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“They want us to sit down and negotiate something that real that takes this huge, huge burden off their shoulders,” he added.
Updated
Chuck Schumer is speaking now as the Senate reconvenes this morning to vote on the same two bills that it failed to pass last night.
President Trump calls what the Democrats want ‘radical’. President Trump, it is not radical to say Americans deserve lower healthcare premiums. It is not radical to say we want to prevent the average American family from getting these huge increases – for those on ACA, $1,000 a month.
Federal government websites post messages blaming Democrats for the shutdown
Several federal government websites are down and and some are explicitly stating the shutdown as the reason. A couple even assign partisan blame.
As we reported yesterday, the housing and urban development department site has the following:
The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government.
The DOJ also blames the left:
Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated.
Trying to load the website data.census.gov, the following message appears:
Due to the lapse of federal funding, portions of this website will not be updated. Any inquiries submitted will not be answered until appropriations are enacted.
The Department of Education website bears a banner reading:
Due to a lapse of appropriations, information on this website may not be monitored or maintained. Inquiries may not receive a response until appropriations are enacted.
Accessing the National Archives site, a pop-up reads that, with some exceptions:
Due to the shutdown of the federal government, National Archives facilities are closed, websites and social media are not being updated or monitored, and activities are canceled.
The state department site bears a red banner reading:
Due to a lapse in appropriations, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.
The commerce department bears a similar statement:
As a result of a temporary government shutdown, portions of this website are not being updated at this time.
The DOD cites the lapse in appropriations, adding:
The most recent appropriations for the Department of War expired at 11:59 p.m. EDT on Sept. 30, 2025. Military personnel will continue in a normal duty status, without pay, until such time as a continuing resolution or appropriations are passed by Congress and signed into law. Civilian personnel not engaged in excepted activities will be placed in a non-work, non-pay status.
The Department of Transportation runs a tiny banner reading:
Portions of the Department of Transportation are currently in shutdown/furlough status due to a lapse in appropriations
Homeland security says: “Due to the lapse in federal funding, this website will not be actively managed.”
The Office for Personnel Management also has: “Due to a lapse in appropriations, Federal Government operations vary by agency.”
Updated
'They did not negotiate at all this time,' says Schumer, defending past anti-shutdown statements
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on CNN this morning, has responded to House Speaker Mike Johnson and the White House’s targeting of him following his previous strong anti-shutdown sentiments expressed during past standoffs.
Schumer said those statements came amid intense negotiations between Republicans and Democrats which kept the government open – negotiations which he said did not take place this time.
During a previous standoff during Trump’s first term, Schumer said: “Shutting down government over a policy difference is self-defeating.”
But today Schumer said that was before Republicans “had done these horrible things to health care”, with both sides currently in an embittered standoff over health care spending.
And the bottom line is, when I was majority leader, we had 13 times to vote on a budget. You know why there was no shutdown? We sat and negotiated with the Republicans every time. They got some things, we got some things.
Schumer said “they did not negotiate at all” this time, despite “repeated entreaties” from himself and his House counterpart Hakeem Jeffries.
White House budget director expected to speak with House GOP this afternoon
With that in mind, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought is expected to hold a call with House Republicans at 1pm ET to discuss what happens next now that the government has shut down, multiple outlets are reporting.
Republicans expect him to brief them on the letter he sent out to agencies instructing them to begin shutting down and to discuss the mass firings that the Trump administration has threatened to pursue during the shutdown.
Yesterday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office:
We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people and cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.
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Schumer has 'handed the keys of the kingdom' to Trump to shrink government, says Johnson
Chuck Schumer has “handed the keys of the kingdom” to the executive branch to “downsize the scope and scale” of the government, House speaker Mike Johnson has told Fox Business this morning, characterizing the shutdown as a “pretty massive backfire” for Democrats.
Addressing the White House budget office’s direction to federal agencies to prepare plans for mass firings amid the shutdown, Johnson said this morning:
While a shutdown is very damaging for real American people who depend upon government services, it can provide an opportunity downsize the scope and the scale of government, which is something that we’ve always wanted to do. So in a way Chuck Schumer has now handed the keys to the kingdom the executive branch under President Trump to do some things that we would not otherwise be able to do because we would not get Democrat votes for them.
He said the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, “gets to decide now what services are essential, what programs and policies should be continued, and which would not be a priority for taxpayers”.
That is what is about to happen and Chuck Schumer has allowed that. And so, from his political perspective, it’s a pretty massive backfire.
There’s now “a real opportunity for government to work more efficiently and effectively for the people if those decisions are made”, Johnson added.
With all this to come regarding potential mass firings of government employees, it’s worth noting that the Trump administration has already been doing this since January.
You can watch the clip of Johnson here.
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Vice-president JD Vance has told CBS Mornings that the government doesn’t want to lay federal workers off during the shutdown. Blaming it on a “faction of Senate Democrats”, he said:
We don’t want to lay anybody off, but what we do want to do is make sure that as much of the essential services of government remain functional as possible.
We were sort of dealt this hand by that faction of Senate Democrats who shut down the government. We’re going to have to deal with it. We’re going to have to make sure that as much of the people’s government remains government remains open or functional as possible.
'Erratic' and 'unhinged' Trump to blame for shutdown, say senior Democrats
Senate democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries have said in a joint statement early this morning that Donald Trump and Republicans had “shut down the federal government because they do not want to protect the healthcare of the American people”.
They said their party remained willing to “find a bipartisan path forward to reopen the government” and end the shutdown, but reiterated their position that the Republican stance on health care remains a barrier. “We need a credible partner,” they said.
“Over the last few days, President Trump’s behavior has become more erratic and unhinged. Instead of negotiating a bipartisan agreement in good faith, he is obsessively posting crazed deepfake videos,” they said.
Here’s the full statement:
After months of making life harder and more expensive, Donald Trump and Republicans have now shut down the federal government because they do not want to protect the healthcare of the American people. Democrats remain ready to find a bipartisan path forward to reopen the government in a way that lowers costs and addresses the Republican healthcare crisis. But we need a credible partner.
Over the last few days, President Trump’s behavior has become more erratic and unhinged. Instead of negotiating a bipartisan agreement in good faith, he is obsessively posting crazed deepfake videos.
The country is in desperate need of an intervention to get out of another Trump shutdown.
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On the president’s schedule today is signing executive orders in the Oval Office today at 4.30pm ET. This will be closed to press but I’ll update you if anything changes.
Before that, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will hold a press briefing around 1pm ET where she will face loads of questions on today’s shutdown. I’ll bring you all the latest from that when it gets going later.
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As the midnight deadline approached last night, the Senate again rejected a Republican plan to keep federal funding flowing and avert a government shutdown.
In a pair of back-to-back votes, each party mostly united to block the other’s stopgap funding proposal, all but ensuring a partial shutdown for the first time in nearly seven years. Both measures needed 60 votes to pass.
Republicans united against a plan offered by Democrats to fund the government through the end of October, that would have also reversed the Medicaid cuts enacted as part of Donald Trump’s tax and spending megabill this summer and extend healthcare subsidies that make health insurance premiums more affordable for low- and middle-income people who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Nearly all Democrats voted to reject a House-passed plan that would have kept federal spending mostly at current levels through 21 November, and bolstered security for the executive branch officials, the supreme court, judges and members of Congress in the wake of the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.
Here’s how each US senator voted on the Republican plan.
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In the stock markets, European stocks and gold prices rose, while Wall Street futures fell on Wednesday as the US government shut down after lawmakers failed to reach a funding deal.
The prospect of services in the United States being closed pushed gold to another record high over $3,895, reports AFP.
In Asia, Tokyo’s stock market sank, while Hong Kong and Shanghai were closed for holidays.
European markets were lifted by pharmaceutical shares after Pfizer was granted reprieve from President Donald Trump’s tariffs by agreeing to lower drug prices in the United States. Trump also announced plans to unveil a website to allow consumers to directly purchase some medications from manufacturers at discounted rates.
The dollar remained under pressure on concerns caused by the US government beginning to shut down Wednesday. Democrats and Republicans failed to break a budget impasse, with talks hinging on health care funding.
“Historically shutdowns have been bad for the US dollar, bad for US equities, and bad for bonds too,” said Emma Wall, chief investment strategist at Hargreaves Lansdown. “Should the shutdown remain unresolved it is likely to drive money outside of the US to markets with more certainty,” she added.
While most shutdowns end after a short period, investors were concerned it could prevent the release Friday of the key non-farm payrolls report – a crucial guide for the Fed on rate decisions.
“Shutdowns have delivered bouts of volatility, but the precedent has been that weakness tends to be short-lived,” noted Joshua Mahony, chief market analyst at Scope Markets.
Futures on all three main indexes in New York were in the red.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev mocked US president Donald Trump, saying that the United States had not sent nuclear submarines to Russian shores as Trump had promised.
Trump on Tuesday cast Medvedev as “a stupid person” and said that he had moved a “submarine or two” to the coast of Russia. He said in August that he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be moved to the “appropriate regions” in response to threats from Medvedev.
“New episode of the thriller series,” Medvedev said on X in English. “Trump once again brought up the subs he allegedly ‘sent to the Russian shores’ insisting they are ‘very well hidden.”
“As the saying goes, it’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room - especially if it’s not there,” Medvedev said.
Naveed Shah, a veteran and activist who served as an enlisted public affairs specialist – an army journalist – uncharacteristically found himself searching for words to describe the address of the newly styled secretary of war to flag officers on Tuesday.
“A lot of the words that are coming to me aren’t fit to print,” said Shah, policy director for Common Defense, a veterans advocacy organization. “The people in that room who have served for 20, 30-plus years in uniform do not need Pete Hegseth to tell them about warrior ethos.”
Hegseth’s hour-long Ted talk-style address touching on physical fitness, the doctrine of lethality and the perils of DEI certainly drew more attention than a policy memo might have, and perhaps more than Donald Trump’s rambling, politically charged hour-long speech that followed.
But the attention came at the cost of respect, said Dana Pittard, a retired army general who commanded soldiers in Iraq and co-author of Hunting the Caliphate.
“I thought it was insulting,” Pittard said of the address, rejecting Hegseth’s assertion that senior officers of color – like himself – had benefitted from a non-existent quota system for promotions.
Online chatter in military groups ahead of the unprecedented, secrecy-shrouded meeting of 800 generals and admirals called to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia had revolved around a demand for some loyalty oath to the administration, or public firings or a declaration of war. Some described it as karmic revenge for decades of mandatory hour-long safety briefings held by unit commanders before dismissing troops for the weekend. Many also wondered if the expensive challenge to security could have been an email.
“Certainly, addressing the troops could be useful or beneficial, but to call 800-plus generals and senior enlisted advisers from around the world into this room just before a government shutdown? It’s not just bad optics or strategy,” Shah said. “A bad cold could have threatened our entire chain of command.”
Retired US supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy fears “democracy is not guaranteed to survive” as “partisanship is becoming much more prevalent and more bitter” in the legal opinions coming from his former institution, he tells NPR in an upcoming interview.
Strikingly, for the interview set to publish in October, NPR’s Nina Totenberg said she asked Kennedy whether he was still sure the supreme court’s major decisions would remain intact – as he told a small group of journalists that he was when he retired in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first presidency.
NPR reported that Kennedy “demurred”, seven years after that prediction – and three years after the federal abortion rights once granted by the Roe v Wade ruling were eliminated by a supreme court with a conservative supermajority anchored by three Trump appointments.
“We live in an era where reasoned, thoughtful, rational, respectful discourse has been replaced by antagonistic, confrontational conversation,” Kennedy, who was appointed to the supreme court during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, remarked.
“It seems to me the idea of partisanship is becoming much more prevalent and more bitter. And my concern is that the court in its own opinions … has to be asked to moderate and become much more respectful.”
Kennedy, who during three decades on the supreme court bench earned a reputation as a moderately conservative and authored the majority opinion legalizing same-sex marriage, ominously added: “Democracy is not guaranteed to survive.”
Those comments from Kennedy came as he prepared to release a new memoir titled Life, Law & Liberty on 14 October. His statements also arrived as the supreme court was scheduled to begin a nine-month term on 6 October – during which it may weigh in on a request to overturn the 5-4 Obergefell supreme court decision that legalized marriage for same-sex couples nationwide in 2015.
Under the shutdown, the education department will stop its investigations into schools and universities over alleged civil rights violations.
Since the mass layoffs in March, the office has operated under a significantly reduced footprint. The department’s civil rights branch lost about half of its staff. The cuts raised questions about whether the office would be able to shrink a backlog of complaints from students who allege they have experienced discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability status, AP reports.
The department’s own data has shown a decline in resolving civil rights cases, while new complaints from families have increased. During the shutdown, work on the pending cases will stop.
Already diminished by cuts by the Trump administration, the US education department will see more of its work come to a halt due to the government shutdown.
The department says many of its core operations will continue in the shutdown kicking off Wednesday. Federal financial aid will keep flowing, and student loan payments will still be due.
But investigations into civil rights complaints will stop, and the department will not issue new federal grants, AP reports. About 87% of its workforce will be furloughed, according to a department contingency plan.
AP reports:
Since he took office, president Donald Trump has called for the dismantling of the education department, saying it has been overrun by liberal thinking. Agency leaders have been making plans to parcel out its operations to other departments, and in July the supreme court upheld mass layoffs that halved the department’s staff.
In a shutdown, the administration has suggested federal agencies could see more positions eliminated entirely. In past shutdowns, furloughed employees were brought back once Congress restored federal funding. This time, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget has threatened the mass firing of federal workers.
Appearing before the House Appropriations Committee in May, Education Secretary Linda McMahon suggested this year’s layoffs had made her department lean – even too lean in some cases. Some staffers were brought back, she said, after officials found that the cuts went too deep.
“You hope that you’re just cutting fat. Sometimes you cut a little muscle, and you realize it as you’re continuing your programs, and you can bring people back to do that,” McMahon said. The department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office in January. It now has about 2,500.
The US government shut down on Wednesday, after congressional Democrats refused to support a Republican plan to extend funding for federal departments unless they won a series of concessions centered on healthcare.
The GOP, which controls the Senate and the House of Representatives, repudiated their 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.
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.
“Republicans are plunging America into a shutdown, rejecting bipartisan talks, pushing a partisan bill and risking America’s healthcare,” top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday evening, as it became clear a shutdown was inevitable.
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.
Senate Republicans have scheduled another round of votes on the two funding bills on Wednesday morning, with the stated goal of giving Democrats an opportunity to change their minds.
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.”
National Parks will largely remain partially open even as the federal government shuts down. A plan released late on Tuesday, hours before the shutdown was set to begin, outlined how swaths of land not able to be locked down – including open-air memorials, park roads, and trails – will remain accessible to the public.
The document also detailed that more than 9,200 employees will be furloughed, reducing staff by roughly 64%. Only workers deemed necessary to protect “life and property”, will remain on duty.
The former superintendent of Joshua Tree national park said in 2019 the park could take hundreds of years to recover from damage caused by visitors during the 2018-19 shutdown.
In 2013, an estimated 8 million recreation visits and $414 million were lost during the 16-day shutdown, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, citing National Park Service data. During the most recent shutdown in 2019, many parks remained open though no visitor services were provided. The Park Service lost $400,000 a day from missed entrance fee revenue, according to the association’s estimates. What’s more, park visitors would have typically spent $20 million on an average January day in nearby communities.
The Guardian’s video desk has compiled this video as Republicans and Democrats blame each other for the shutdown.
Workers who were furloughed during the 2018-19 shutdown shared their stories with the Guardian in 2019. One, Leisyka Parrott, a furloughed employee with the Bureau of Land Management said: “The thing is when you get back pay, all the fees that you incur by missing payments – you don’t get paid back for those. If you are late for a payment and have a $25 fee, the government doesn’t pay for that.”
“There’s all kinds of issues with raising families, just buying gasoline,” said Franco DiCroce, a US army corps of engineers employee speaking in his capacity as president of Local 98 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers told the Guardian. “Most of these people, their salaries are not skyrocketing. They’re suffering even more, because some of them live check-to-check, so if they don’t have money coming in, they’re going to have difficulty meeting their needs, to even buy groceries.”
Many turned to food banks in order to eat. “You’ve worked for 10, 20, 30 years for the government,” said Nurel Storey, an officer for the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 22. “And all of a sudden things have just been shut off, for no fault of your own.”
The 35-day partial shutdown of the US government that started in 2018 cost about $11bn and shaved 0.2% off the nation’s annual economic growth forecasts, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said in January 2019.
According to the CBO, that shutdown hurt economic growth because it affected roughly 800,000 workers and delayed federal spending on goods and services.
This shutdown is expected to be worse than previous ones. The impact on federal workers could be even more severe.
Before Trump’s most recent threat of mass layoffs on Tuesday, a memo released last week by the White House’s office of management and budget told agencies not just to prepare for temporary furloughs but for permanent layoffs in the event of a shutdown.
The memo directed agencies to ready reduction-in-force notices for federal programs whose funding sources would lapse in the event of a shutdown and are “not consistent with the president’s priorities”.
OMB led the administration’s earlier efforts to shrink the federal workforce as part of a broader government efficiency campaign led by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”.
In a statement on Thursday, AFL-CIO’s president, Liz Shuler, said government employees had “already suffered immensely” this year under the Trump administration’s vast cuts to the federal workforce. “They are not pawns for the president’s political games,” she said.
Asked about the memo on Thursday, Trump blamed Democrats, saying a shutdown was what the party wanted. “They never change,” he said.
At a news conference, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Thursday that Democrats “will not be intimidated” by the Trump administration’s threats to fire more federal employees if the federal government shuts down. He added that his message to Russell Vought, the head of OMB, was simple: “Get lost.”
Gold hit a record high and Wall Street futures fell with the dollar Wednesday after the US government shutdown, though most Asian and European markets edged up.
Britain’s stock market hit a new record high, as investors shrugged off concerns about the US government shutdown.
You can follow all of the day’s business developments with Graeme Wearden in the business live blog
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Fears shutdown will lead 'worst polluters' to dodge EPA controls
A government shutdown raises questions about how the Environmental Protection Agency can carry out its mission of protecting the America’s health and environment with little more than skeletal staff and funding. The Associated Press has carried this report.
In President Donald Trump’s second term, the EPA has leaned hard into an agenda of deregulation and facilitating Trump’s boosting of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to meet what he has called an energy emergency.
Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy official under President Bill Clinton, said it’s natural to worry that a shutdown will lead “the worst polluters” to treat it as a chance to dump toxic pollution without getting caught.
“Nobody will be holding polluters accountable for what they dump into the air we breathe, in the water we drink while EPA is shut down,” said Symons, now a senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency officials advocating for a strong Earth-friendly department.
A scientific study of pollution from about 200 coal-fired power plants during the 2018-2019 government shutdown found they “significantly increased their particulate matter emissions due to the EPA’s furlough.” Soot pollution is connected to thousands of deaths per year in the United States.
The EPA’s shutdown plan calls for it to stop doing non-criminal pollution inspections needed to enforce clean air and water rules. It won’t issue new grants to other governmental agencies, update its website, issue new permits, approve state requests dealing with pollution regulations or conduct most scientific research, according to the EPA document. Except in situations where the public health would be at risk, work on Superfund cleanup sites will stop.
Marc Boom, a former EPA policy official during the Biden administration, said inspections under the Chemical Accident Risk Reduction program would halt. Those are done under the Clean Air Act to make sure facilities are adequately managing the risk of chemical accidents.
“Communities near the facilities will have their risk exposure go up immediately since accidents will be more likely to occur,” Boom said.
He also said EPA hotlines for reporting water and other pollution problems likely will be closed. “So if your water tastes off later this week, there will be no one at EPA to pick up the phone,” he said.
What does the shutdown mean for flights and travel into and around the US?
While many airport employees, including air traffic controllers, are required to work during the shutdown as they are categorized as essential, they will not be paid and it’s likely there will be staffing issues. That could mean travel disruptions in the US and for overseas visitors.
What is the likely impact on air travel?
Flights will continue but delays and cancellations are very likely. Air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration employees who staff airport security checkpoints are essential workers, but will be working without pay. In previous shutdowns flights were significantly disrupted and security lines were lengthy.
The shutdown could also impact the air traffic control system. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recruied 2,000 new controllers in 2025 but training will be hit by the shutdown.
What about trains?
Amtrak trains will run. Amtrak does receive federal grants, but generates revenue, so it doesn’t depend on government funding in the short term. It cannot operate indefinitely though and if a shutdown went on for long enough, it could be affected.
Passports and visas?
A State Department spokesperson told CNN on Monday that “Consular operations domestically and abroad will remain operational. This includes passports, visas, and assisting US citizens abroad.”
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National Park staff are among federal workers required to stop working in a government shutdown. But staff feared Trump officials could once again push for leaving America’s parks open when they are unstaffed.
Irreversible damage was done at popular parks, including Joshua Tree in California, following a month-long shutdown in Donald Trump’s first term, when his administration demanded parks be kept open while funding was paused and workers were furloughed.
Without supervision, visitors left behind trails of destruction. Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend national park. Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down at Joshua Tree national park, as trash and toilets overflowed. Tire tracks crushed sensitive plants and desert habitats from illegal off-roading vehicles in Death Valley. There were widespread reports of wildlife poaching, search-and-rescue crews were quickly overwhelmed with calls, and visitor centers were broken into.
“National parks don’t run themselves. It is hard-working National Park Service employees that keep them safe, clean and accessible,” 40 former superintendents said in a letter issued to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, this week, urging him to close the parks if a shutdown occurs. “If sufficient staff aren’t there, visitors shouldn’t be either.”
A plan released late on Tuesday, mere hours before the shutdown was set to begin, outlined how swaths of land not able to be locked down – including open-air memorials, park roads, and trails – will remain accessible to the public. The document also detailed that more than 9,200 employees will be furloughed, reducing staff by roughly 64%. Only workers deemed necessary to protect “life and property”, will remain on duty.
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What would it take to end the US government shutdown?
A deep impasse between Donald Trump and congressional Democrats prevented Congress and the White House from reaching a funding deal. So what will take to end the shutdown?
What Republicans want
Trump’s Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and have already scored some big budget wins this year. The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ passed in July and it boosted spending for defense and immigration enforcement, rolled back spending on green energy and other Democratic priorities, while making major cuts in the Medicaid healthcare program for low-income and disabled people to help pay for tax cuts focused mainly on the wealthy. Republicans also have broadly supported the White House’s efforts to claw back money that had already been approved by Congress for foreign aid and public broadcasting, even though that undermines lawmakers’ constitutional authority over spending matters. They have said they would vote for a continuing resolution that would extend funding at current levels through 21 November to allow more time to negotiate a full-year deal.
What Democrats want
As the minority party, Democrats do not have much power. But Republicans will need at least seven Democratic votes to pass any spending bill out of the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to advance most legislation in the 100-seat chamber.
This time, Democrats are using that leverage to push for renewing expanded healthcare subsidies for people who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Their proposal would make permanent enhanced tax breaks that are otherwise due to expire at the end of the year and make them available to more middle-income households. If those tax breaks were to expire, health insurance costs would increase dramatically for many of the 24 million Americans who get their coverage through the ACA, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Democrats also want language inserted into any funding bill that would prohibit Trump from unilaterally ignoring their ACA provisions or temporarily withholding funds.
They also want to roll back other restrictions on ACA coverage that were enacted in the so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’. Those changes would provide health coverage for seven million Americans by 2035, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but also increase government healthcare spending by $662bn over 10 years. Republicans say they are open to considering a fix for the expiring tax breaks, but say the issue should be handled separately. Republicans have accused Democrats of trying to use the stopgap funding bill to open the gates for government healthcare subsidies for immigrants in the US illegally.
Kamala Harris and Democrats take aim at Republicans
The former Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris took aim at Republicans over the shutdown, posting 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.
Congresswoman Shontel Brown said Donald Trump and Republicans alone are responsible for the shutdown. She said in a statement:
Washington Republicans have totally and completely failed in their responsibility to fund the government. House Republicans weren’t even in Washington this week as the government was close to shutting down. This was no accident; it was a deliberate choice.
We came to work to save health care – they went on vacation.
Every day this shutdown drags on, families, workers, and communities in Northeast Ohio will pay the price: service members and federal employees will miss paychecks, Social Security and veterans’ services could be delayed, and small business loans will stall.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett said Republicans “chose chaos” in a post on X:
Make no mistake: Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. This is THEIR shutdown. They had every tool to govern and chose chaos instead. The American people are the ones paying the price.
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Which agencies keep operating and which might be affected?
Now that a lapse in funding has occurred, the law requires agencies to furlough their “non-excepted” employees. Excepted employees, which include those who work to protect life and property, stay on the job but don’t get paid until after the shutdown ends.
The White House Office of Management and Budget begins the process with instructions to agencies that a lapse in appropriations has occurred and they should initiate orderly shutdown activities. That memo went out Tuesday evening.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that roughly 750,000 federal employees could be furloughed, with the total daily cost of their compensation at roughly $400m.
FBI investigators, CIA officers, air traffic controllers and agents operating airport checkpoints keep working. So do members of the Armed Forces.
Those programs that rely on mandatory spending generally continue during a shutdown. Social Security payments still go out. Seniors relying on Medicare coverage can still see their doctors and health care providers can be reimbursed.
Each federal agency develops its own shutdown plan, outlining which workers would stay on the job and which would be furloughed.
Health and human services will furlough about 41% of its staff out of nearly 80,000 employees, according to a contingency plan posted on its website. As part of that plan, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would continue to monitor disease outbreaks, while activities that will stop include research into health risks and ways to prevent illness.
Research and patient care at the National Institutes of Health would be upended. Patients currently enrolled in studies at the research-only hospital nicknamed the “house of hope” will continue to receive care. Additional sick patients hoping for access to experimental therapies can’t enroll except in special circumstances, and no new studies will begin.
As the shutdown neared, the National Park Service had not yet said whether it will close its more than 400 sites across the US to visitors. Park officials said Tuesday afternoon that contingency plans were still being updated and would be posted to the service’s website.
Many national parks including Yellowstone and Yosemite stayed open during a 35-day shutdown during Trump’s first term. Limited staffing led to vandalism, gates being pried open and other problems including an off-roader mowing down one of the namesake trees at Joshua Tree national park in California.
At the Food and Drug Administration, its “ability to protect and promote public health and safety would be significantly impacted, with many activities delayed or paused”. For example, the agency would not accept new drug applications or medical device submissions that require payment of a user fee.
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What does a government shutdown mean and why is this year’s threat more serious?
What does a government shutdown mean?
When Congress fails to pass funding legislation, federal agencies are required by law to halt operations, triggering a shutdown. Employees classified as “non-excepted” are placed on unpaid furlough, while excepted staff – those whose jobs involve protecting life and property – must continue working without pay until after the shutdown ends.
Until Congress acts, many federal services will be temporarily halted or disrupted as certain agencies cease all non-essential functions.
In a polarized Washington, with the chambers narrowly divided, shutdown threats have become a feature of recent congressional budget battles. But more often than not, the parties’ leaders are able to cobble together an 11th hour compromise to forestall a lapse in funding. Not this time.
How long will the government be shut down, and what was the longest shutdown?
How long it will last remains unclear. A standoff in 2018, during Trump’s first term, resulted in a 34-day shutdown, the longest in the modern era. At the time, roughly 800,000 of the federal government’s 2.1 million employees were sidelined without pay.
Why is the government shutting down this time?
The federal government’s new fiscal year began on Wednesday, without an agreement on a short-term funding bill.
Democrats, locked out of power in Washington, have little leverage, but their votes are needed to overcome the filibuster in the Senate. They are demanding an extension of subsidies that limit the cost of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and are set to expire, a rollback of Medicaid cuts made in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the restoration of funding to public media that was cut in the rescissions package.
Congressional Democrats are under pressure to use their leverage to stand up to Trump and his administration. In March, Schumer lent the necessary Democratic votes to approve a Republican-written short-term funding measure without securing any concessions – a move that infuriated the party’s base.
Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, are refusing to negotiate with Democrats over their healthcare demands. Instead, GOP leaders in the Senate have vowed to keep forcing Democrats to vote on a stopgap measure that would extend funding levels, mostly at current levels, through 21 November. That bill narrowly passed the House but fell short of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate on Tuesday.
Donald Trump hosted Congressional leaders at the White House earlier this week, but the meeting failed to produce a breakthrough.
Why is this year’s threat to shut down the government more serious?
This time, the impact on federal workers could be even more severe. In a memo released last week, the White House’s office of management and budget (OMB) told agencies not just to prepare for temporary furloughs but for permanent layoffs in the event of a shutdown.
The memo directed agencies to ready reduction-in-force notices for federal programs whose funding sources would lapse in the event of a shutdown and are “not consistent with the president’s priorities”.
The OMB led the administration’s earlier efforts to shrink the federal workforce as part of a broader government efficiency campaign led by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”.
At an event on Tuesday, Trump said “a lot of good can come down from shutdowns” and suggested he would use the pause to “get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things”.
The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has said that Democrats “will not be intimidated” by the Trump administration’s threats to fire more federal employees if the federal government shuts down. He has said that his message to Russell Vought, the head of OMB, was simple: “Get lost.”
Two major federal employee unions sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally threatening mass layoffs during a shutdown.
What happens when the government shuts down?
In the event of a full or partial government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers may be furloughed or required to work without pay. Approximately 750,000 federal employees will be furloughed each day of a government shutdown, according to an estimate by the congressional budget office released on Tuesday.
Operations deemed essential – such as social security, Medicare, military duties, immigration enforcement and air traffic control – would continue, but other services may be disrupted or delayed. Mail delivery and post office operations would continue without interruption.
Agencies have been releasing updated contingency plans in the event of a shutdown. The Department of Education said nearly all its federal employees would be furloughed, while most of the Department of Homeland Security workforce would remain on the job.
According to an interior department contingency plan posted late on Tuesday evening, national parks will remain partially open. “Park roads, lookouts, trails, and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors,” it said.
During the government shutdown in 2019, national parks reported garbage, staffing shortages and even three deaths as a result of the financial crunch.
The impact of a shutdown can be far-reaching and potentially long-lasting. Previous shutdowns have disrupted tourism to national parks and the Smithsonian museums in Washington, slowed air travel, delayed food-safety inspections, and postponed immigration hearings.
While the broader economy may not feel the effects immediately, analysts warn that a prolonged shutdown could slow growth, disrupt markets and erode public trust.
Updated
US government shuts down after Democrats refuse to back Republican funding plan
A US government shutdown has been triggered after a deadline to reach a funding agreement before the start of the new fiscal year, on 1 October, came and went without a deal.
Democrats and Republicans angrily blamed each other and refused to budge from their positions as the country hurtled towards the midnight ET deadline, unable to find agreement or even negotiate as hundreds of thousands of federal workers stood to be furloughed or laid off.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Republicans were trying to “bully” Democrats by refusing to negotiate on an extension of healthcare benefits and other priorities. Senate majority leader John Thune said Republicans were “not going to be held hostage” by the Democrats’ demands.
Hours before the shutdown, Donald Trump told reporters he had “no choice” but to lay off federal workers if no deal was reached. Asked about why he was considering mass layoffs, Trump said: “No country can afford to pay for illegal immigration, healthcare for everybody that comes into the country. And that’s what they [Democrats] are insisting. They want open borders. They want men playing in women’s sports. They want transgender for everybody. They never stop. They don’t learn. We won an election in the landslide. They just don’t learn. So we have no choice. I have to do that for the country.”
In a polarized Washington, with the chambers narrowly divided, shutdown threats have become a feature of recent congressional budget battles. A standoff in 2018, during Trump’s first term, resulted in a 34-day shutdown, the longest in the modern era. At the time, roughly 800,000 of the federal government’s 2.1 million employees were sidelined without pay.
Senate Republicans have scheduled another round of votes on the two funding bills on Wednesday morning, with the stated goal of giving Democrats an opportunity to change their minds.
The Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have blamed Donald Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, saying they “do not want to protect the healthcare of the American people”.
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.”
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.
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. “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.
We will bring you the latest news and reactions on the shutdown as we get them.
