Washington, D.C.
The United States federal government entered a partial shutdown just after midnight on Wednesday as lawmakers and President Donald Trump failed to resolve a bitter budget impasse centered on Democratic demands for healthcare funding.
This marks the first shutdown since the longest in history—lasting 35 days—almost seven years ago. The stoppage will immediately halt operations at multiple federal departments and agencies, affecting hundreds of thousands of government workers.
President Trump quickly blamed Democrats for the stalled talks and escalated the political confrontation by threatening to punish the party and its voters during the stoppage. He suggested targeting progressive priorities and forcing mass public sector job cuts.
“So we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected. And they’re Democrats, they’re going to be Democrats,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. He added that a “lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” implying he would use the pause to “get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
Government operations began grinding to a halt at 12:01 am (ET), following a frenetic but ultimately failed bid in the Senate to approve a short-term funding resolution that had already passed the House of Representatives.
Hopes for a compromise had been minimal since a last-gasp meeting at the White House on Monday yielded no progress. While budget negotiations are invariably fraught, Congress typically manages to avoid them escalating into shutdowns.
Democrats, currently the minority in both chambers of Congress, have been seeking to leverage their rare influence eight months into Trump’s second presidency, a period that has seen aggressive attempts to dismantle entire government agencies. Trump’s threat of new job cuts adds to anxieties already gripping the federal workforce, which faced large-scale firings earlier this year orchestrated by tycoon Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Healthcare Funding at Risk
In the 100-member Senate, government funding bills require 60 votes—seven more than the Republicans control. Republicans had proposed extending current funding until late November, allowing time to negotiate a longer-term spending plan.
However, Democrats insisted on seeing hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare spending restored, specifically targeting the Obamacare health insurance program for low-income households, which the Trump administration is likely to eliminate. Hours ahead of the midnight deadline, almost all Senate Democrats voted against a House-passed, seven-week stop-gap funding measure.
It remains unclear how long this current shutdown will last. Since Congress enacted the modern-day budget process in 1976, the federal government has shuttered 21 times. The longest began on December 22, 2018, when Democrats and Trump reached an impasse over the $5.7 billion the president demanded for a border wall during his first term. That stoppage resulted in approximately 380,000 federal employees being furloughed and another 420,000 working without pay.
The shutdown will not immediately affect vital functions like the Postal Service, the military, and welfare programs such as Social Security and food stamps. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, up to 750,000 workers could be sent home each day and will not be paid until the shutdown concludes.
