The federal government shutdown entered its third week on Wednesday, after the Senate failed to advance a House-passed GOP bill to fund the government for the ninth time.
With no breakthrough in negotiations, House Speaker Mike Johnson cautioning that the impasse could become “one of the longest shutdowns in U.S. history unless Democrats drop their partisan demands.” (the longest shutdown lasted 35 days in December 2018, and January 2019). Despite mounting pressure, Democrats and Republicans remain deadlocked over competing short-term funding plans. The stalemate in Congress has Republicans demanding passage of a “clean” continuing resolution that would reopen the government through at least November 21, free of additional spending provisions. Democrats, meanwhile, insist that any funding bill must include an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are scheduled to expire at the end of the year — a measure estimated to cost roughly $1 trillion.
In light of the ongoing government shutdown, a federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from firing federal workers, with the ruling coming five days after the administration issued reduction-in-force notifications to more than 4,000 federal workers. San Francisco U.S. District Court Judge Susan Yvonne Illston told lawyers for the administration on Wednesday at a hearing where she issued the temporary restraining order that “the activities that are being undertaken here are contrary to the laws .. you can’t do this in a nation of laws, and we have laws here, and the things that are being articulated here are not within the law.”
Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had said Wednesday that the Trump administration could slash more than 10,000 federal jobs during the government shutdown: “We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding. We now have an opportunity to do that, and that’s where we’re going to be looking for our opportunities.” Trump and Vought have followed through on earlier threats to dismiss federal employees during the shutdown. According to sources cited by ABC News, workers from several major agencies — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — were among those terminated.
Trump had said he plans to release a list Friday of “Democratic” programs he’s eliminated, stating: “We are closing up Democrat programs that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open up again.. We’re able to do things that we’ve never been able to do before. The Democrats are getting killed.”
Though Trump has made funding available for military service members to get their next paychecks, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., said it’s a temporary fix: “If the Democrats continue to vote to keep the government closed as they have done now so many times, then we know that U.S. troops are going to risk missing a full paycheck at the end of this month.”
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