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US President Donald Trump will meet with congressional leaders on Monday for crunch talks as the threat of a costly government shutdown within days looms over Washington.
Trump will host leaders from both parties at the White House after cancelling a meeting earlier this week with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives.
The federal government will run out of funding, leaving hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed and many public services shuttered, unless lawmakers can strike an agreement to keep the government open by a Tuesday 11.59pm deadline. Republicans need at least seven Democratic votes in the Senate to pass their stop-gap bill to keep funding going until November 20.
The White House raised the stakes on Wednesday when the Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to consider using a shutdown as the opportunity to fire federal employees, rather than temporarily lay them off. The threat came on the heels of sweeping jobs cuts earlier this year at the hands of the administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Republicans and Democrats have said that if there is a shut down, it will be the other party’s fault. Republicans have accused Democrats of holding the federal government hostage, while Democrats have criticised Republicans for not engaging in serious negotiations and eschewing the tradition of reaching a bipartisan funding agreement.
“These people are crazy, the Democrats. So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down, but they’re the ones that are shutting down”, Trump said on Friday.
“We don’t want to shut down the government”, vice-president JD Vance told Fox News on Sunday. “But it’s really up to the Democrats.”
Schumer said on Sunday that the upcoming White House meeting was “a good first step” but that “we need a serious negotiation”. If in the meeting Trump “is going to rant and just yell at Democrats . . . we won’t get anything done.”
Whether the government stays open, “depends on the Republicans”, he told NBC. “I think they felt the heat and they now want to sit down.”
Monday’s meeting will include Trump, Schumer, Jeffries, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and John Thune, the top Republican in the Senate.
Johnson said on CNN that the president wants to talk to Schumer and Jeffries and “just try to convince them to follow common sense and do what’s right by the American people.” He would not say whether there would be negotiations during the meeting.
Republicans have put forward a plan to keep the government temporarily funded through November 20. They have argued their plan is a “clean” continuing resolution, meaning that it broadly keeps the government funded at current levels.
Democrats are “playing with fire” and have taken the US government and American people “hostage”, Thune told NBC on Sunday.
But Democrats have said they will only sign on to a deal that extends tax credits linked to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, that are due to expire at the end of the year. Republicans have claimed that Democrats want to give undocumented migrants hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare benefits.
“They want to shut it down because they want to give billions, ultimately, trillions of dollars, to illegal migrants”, Trump said on Friday.
Jeffries said on ABC that Democrats’ “position has been very clear: cancel the cuts, lower the cost, save healthcare”.
The last government shutdown, during Trump’s first administration, was the longest in US history, lasting 35 days.
Republican strategist Whit Ayres said that “it is really hard to anticipate ahead of time” which party will pay the political price of a shut down. “Most people just react by saying, ‘a pox on both of your houses. You can’t get anything done, you can’t even keep the government open.’”
