Shutdown to extend into next week as Trump readies budget knife

WASHINGTON — The partial government shutdown rolled on Thursday with both sides dug in and President Donald Trump using the funding lapse as an excuse to cut billions of dollars in “dead wood,” as he put it, throughout the executive branch.

Trump said in a social media post that he’d meet with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought to go over “which of the many Democrat Agencies” should be cut as the GOP seeks to make the shutdown more painful for Democratic leaders.

Neither chamber had votes on Thursday as lawmakers observed the Yom Kippur holiday, with the House not returning until Tuesday. The Senate will get another opportunity to vote Friday at 1:30 p.m., but there were no signs of a bipartisan breakthrough yet.

After Friday’s votes, shaping up to be the same futile messaging exercise that previous votes have been, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said there’s no point in senators sticking around this weekend if there’s no agreement.

“If that fails, then we’ll have the weekend to think about it, come back, and vote again on Monday,” Thune said Thursday.

The main sticking point: Democrats want an extension of enhanced health insurance subsidies for coverage bought on government-run exchanges that expire at the end of the year, arguing it can’t wait because insurers are already locking in their premium rates for 2026. Republicans say they’re willing to have that discussion, but only once the government is open.

“We cannot accept an empty promise, which is, ‘Oh, we’ll deal with this later.’ The fact is, that this crisis is in front of us now,” Senate Appropriations ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said on a call with reporters Thursday. “Come to the table now, work with us for a concrete solution, and we can get moving again, which is what all of us want to do, and all of us should be doing.”

The House, which passed a seven-week continuing resolution on Sept. 19, isn’t back until Tuesday. But GOP leaders have remained in town to hammer Democrats daily for opposing the House-passed bill, which doesn’t have any partisan poison pills as far as Republicans are concerned.

At a news conference Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson took a shot at all but the three members of the Senate Democratic caucus who’ve voted for the GOP stopgap bill.

“All the pressure should be on the 44 Democrats who are dug in to try to pander to the part of that corner of their base,” Johnson, R-La., said. “How important is it to appeal to the radical left of your base and hurt Americans?”

Democrats got a polling boost on Thursday, however, when The Washington Post released a poll of 1,010 randomly selected adults reached by text message. Respondents by a 17-point margin said they blame Trump and Republicans more than the Democrats, and two-thirds of respondents expressed at least some concern about the shutdown’s impacts.

“Americans blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, and the longer they drag it out, the deeper the pain and that blame will grow,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement.

The poll also found that a plurality of respondents, 47%, believe that lawmakers should demand an extension of the expiring health care subsidies even if it means the shutdown continues.

The flash poll — which was taken Wednesday, the first day of the partial shutdown — didn’t get into some of the nuances of the health care issue, however, including that the subsidies are set to shrink, not expire altogether.

Republicans have sought to exploit what they think is a political vulnerability on health care in the Democrats’ stopgap funding alternative that the Senate has been casting votes on alongside the GOP version.

In addition to a permanent extension of the bigger health care tax credits, which Democrats expanded in the 117th Congress, Democrats’ bill would repeal all the health care cuts in Republicans “big, beautiful” reconciliation package.

Some of those repeals would restore lost Medicaid funding that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have gone to fund health care services for unauthorized immigrants. Although it’s a relatively small portion of the $1 trillion-plus price tag, it’s given Republicans a platform to claim Democrats want “taxpayer-funded benefits going straight to illegal aliens,” as Johnson put it Thursday.

A White House memo tallied up $193 billion in 10-year spending on “healthcare for illegal immigrants and non-citizens,” though it’s important to note that not all noncitizens are in the country illegally and Republicans have been conflating the two statuses in their talking points.

Some items on the White House list have a direct connection to unauthorized immigrants. That includes $28 billion saved in the GOP budget package, based on Congressional Budget Office scores, from reducing the 90% federal match for emergency medical care for undocumented immigrants in states that expanded Medicaid under the 2010 health care law.

Another $35 billion would come from repealing what Republicans call the “California loophole,” or the use of state taxes on Medicaid managed care plans to obtain additional matching funds from the federal government that have gone toward care for unauthorized immigrants.

Other items in the White House fact sheet deal with reconciliation provisions narrowing eligibility for noncitizens’ access to Medicaid, Medicare and exchange subsidies.

These are individuals who are “lawfully present” in the U.S. but include millions who Republicans believe the Biden administration improperly allowed in, including many asylum and parole beneficiaries. The reconciliation law limited coverage to green-card holders, Cuban and Haitian entrants and people residing in the U.S. under the Compacts of Free Association.

Democrats’ response has been to stay on message repeating the mantra that it is already illegal for the federal government to finance health care for unauthorized immigrants and none of their proposals would change that.

And the reality is Democrats have always known repealing major pieces of the GOP budget package is a nonstarter. Schumer has already narrowed Democrats’ health care demands to an extension of the enhanced exchange tax credits; if the reconciliation law is left alone, that extension wouldn’t open up subsidized coverage to additional noncitizen categories, let alone undocumented immigrants.

Meanwhile, it’s a waiting game to see how much damage Trump and Vought can do in blue states under cover of the shutdown.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday.

Vought, his budget director, has already announced large-scale layoffs are coming and has axed several big-ticket public works and clean energy projects in blue states. In the coming days, more detail is expected, with an eye toward putting as much pressure on Democrats as possible.

“I think as this shutdown goes on, other people will, honestly I would put it, sober up, and recognize we shouldn’t hold the day-to-day operation of the government at risk to achieve objectives that really don’t relate to the normal appropriations process,” House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said in a C-SPAN interview Thursday.

Legal experts are divided on reductions-in-force occurring during the shutdown, and federal worker unions have already filed suit.

But the OMB’s own guidelines generally require 60 days’ notice to affected workers before their employment is terminated, by which time the shutdown may be over and they’d be owed back pay, regardless of RIF status. Still, the White House is betting that existing RIF regulations will allow their cuts to pass muster in the courts.

If Republicans’ strategy is let the pressure build on Senate Democrats to peel off and buck their leadership, they might be waiting a while, however.

Republicans only need five more to cross the aisle to reach the magic 60-vote threshold — along with Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and Maine independent Angus King, a Democratic caucus member.

But even Thune seems to realize that a pressure campaign aimed at the rank-and-file has much less chance of success than a deal blessed by Democratic leaders.

Mindful that few if any Democrats will want to be the eighth vote on their side, making them the 60th and deciding vote to capitulate to Trump and the Republicans, Thune said Thursday that hopefully there are “10 or more” Democrats who agree to end the shutdown.

“I will just say that all of us are trying to find Republicans who are willing to come to the table and work with us to find solutions, and there are conversations going on,” Murray told reporters. “We need Thune, we need Johnson, and we need the president to do the same.”