WASHINGTON — The federal government is barreling toward a shutdown Tuesday night, with President Donald Trump and Democratic leaders engaged in a fierce blame game and trading insults about each other.
Hours before the midnight deadline, the Senate gaveled out for the evening with plans to return Wednesday. A shutdown is all but assured to begin after midnight.
It's unclear where the parties go from here. The Senate voted down competing Republican and Democratic plans to stave off a shutdown Tuesday evening.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he hoped the defeat of the GOP bill — for a second time this month — "will open lines of communications" with Republicans. That hasn’t yet happened.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., “and I have made clear we are ready, willing and able to sit down and with anyone, anytime, any place to fund the government and to address the Republican health care crisis," Jeffries said shortly before the Senate votes.
Bipartisan talks have been at a standstill in the 24 hours since the Big Four congressional leaders met with Trump at the White House on Monday.
The impacts of a shutdown would be felt by many. None of the millions of federal workers would be paid, and hundreds of thousands of them would be furloughed. In recent days, White House officials had tried to allow military personnel to continue receiving pay during a shutdown, according to a source familiar with the discussions, but those efforts were unsuccessful. So service members wouldn’t be paid during a shutdown, either.
And the White House has threatened to fire federal workers in a shutdown, as well. Asked Tuesday morning how many government employees his administration would lay off, Trump responded: “Well, we may do a lot, and that’s only because of the Democrats.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated Tuesday that a government shutdown would lead to the furloughs of about 750,000 federal employees.
Responding to Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who asked for the assessment, the CBO said of the furloughed workers: The “total daily cost of their compensation would be roughly $400 million. The number of furloughed employees could vary by the day because some agencies might furlough more employees the longer a shutdown persists and others might recall some initially furloughed employees.”
Federal agencies, including the Defense and State departments, have already posted their plans for how they would operate.
In the final hours before a shutdown, the two parties traded insults rather than serious proposals.
Trump shared a crude post Monday night on Truth Social that showed Schumer with fake artificial intelligence-generated audio, saying that Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bulls---” and that if they give undocumented immigrants health care, they would vote for his party.
The post depicted Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a mustache as he stood silently by Schumer's side. Mariachi music played in the background.
The video referred to a Trump talking point that Democrats are demanding health care for undocumented immigrants in exchange for their votes to keep the government open. Democrats have called that a lie. They have pushed to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies and to undo Trump's Medicaid cuts, not to pay for health care for people who are in the country illegally.
Schumer responded to the video on X: “If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate. You can only throw tantrums.”
Jeffries had tough words for Trump at a news conference on the steps of the Capitol on Tuesday morning. "Mr. President, next time you have something to say about me, don’t cop out through a racist and fake AI video," he said, surrounded by dozens of rank-and-file Democrats. "When I’m back in the Oval Office, say it to my face."
The House leader also shared a photo on X of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. "This is real," Jeffries wrote above the photo, which was taken at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 1997. (Trump has said that he and Epstein had a falling out and that he was unaware of Epstein's crimes.)
The insults indicated that the two sides were nowhere close to an agreement to keep the government's lights on past Tuesday's deadline.
“It looks to me like we’re headed for a shutdown," Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said earlier Tuesday. "And you know me, I’m the most optimistic person you know.”
Political theater dominated Tuesday. Democrats filed onto the House floor during a pro forma session as the party's top appropriator, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, tried to offer her party's plan to keep the government open. But Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who was presiding, didn’t acknowledge her and quickly adjourned.
“Shame on you!" some Democrats jeered at Griffith.
Democrats on the floor had a poster with Speaker Mike Johnson’s face on it and the words: “Missing Person.” Johnson, R-La., was in the Capitol on Tuesday and attended the meeting with Trump on Monday. But the House left town Sept. 19 after it passed a seven-week funding bill, and it isn’t set to return until Oct. 7.
Tuesday evening, the GOP-controlled Senate made a last-gasp attempt to avert a shutdown but came up short. It voted down competing Democratic and Republican funding plans, a repeat of earlier this month when the same bills failed to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to pass.
The GOP bill had cleared the House on a party-line 217-212 vote on Sept. 19, but it was rejected Tuesday in the Senate 55-45, shy of the 60 votes needed to break a Democratic filibuster. Three members of the Democratic Caucus — Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Angus King, I-Maine — joined Republicans in voting yes; just one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted no with Democrats.
The rival Democratic bill to fund the government was also rejected, on a party-line 47-53 vote.
If a shutdown occurs, "that’s a sad day for the country, it truly is. We have to find a better solution," said Fetterman, who voted for both bills. "As a senator, I think that’s one of our core responsibilities, keep the government open ... and then debate and figure out some kind of compromise."
Republicans have argued that Democrats could avert a shutdown by simply voting for the House-passed continuing resolution, which would fund the government at current levels through Nov. 21.
But Democrats said they are trying to stave off a looming "health care crisis." Specifically, Democrats want any continuing resolution to include an extension of Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. They have also pushed for rolling back some of the cuts and changes to Medicaid that were enacted in Trump's "big, beautiful bill" this year.
Speaking to reporters in the Capitol after Monday's meeting with Trump, Schumer said Trump appeared to be "not aware" of the impacts of expiring Obamacare subsidies on everyday Americans. And he urged Trump to try to persuade GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to back a deal to extend the subsidies.
"It’s now in the president’s hands," Schumer said, with Jeffries at his side. "He can avoid a shutdown if he gets the Republican leaders to go along with what we want."
