President Trump, whom Democrats say is the only Republican leader who can break the government funding stalemate, has stayed out of the fray on Capitol Hill, leaving lawmakers in both parties pessimistic about reaching a deal until he engages in serious talks.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said on Friday that he will stick with his plan of forcing Senate Democrats to keep voting on a House-passed seven-week resolution to fund the government, but the measure has already failed four times and has little chance of picking up new support.
Thune is betting that it’s only a matter time before eight Democrats vote for the House bill, giving it the 60 it needs to advance to Trump’s desk, but that wager is looking more and more like a long shot.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says any deal to reopen the government lies with Trump, not Thune or Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“The bottom line on that is we need the president to be involved. Johnson and a whole lot of his caucus don’t like the ACA, don’t want to do the extensions. A lot of Republican senators in the Senate do but they’re not enough. Thune is not enough,” Schumer said.
“You need Johnson and particularly you need Donald Trump to get it done,” he added. “We need real improvements in Americans’ health care.”
Johnson told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that “the House did its job” and stuck to his plan to keep the chamber out of session to ramp up pressure on the Senate to act.
He has extended the House recess until Oct. 14 to underscore his message to Democratic senators that approving the House-passed funding bill is the only way to end the shutdown.
The Speaker told House Republicans on a private call Saturday that he would give them 48 hours of notice if they need to return to the Capitol this week, but so far he has showed no sign of moving to Plan B.
Trump has stayed away from negotiating directly with Democrats, instead trying to ramp up political pressure from the outside by threatening mass layoffs of federal workers and accusing Democrats of wanting to steer hundreds of billions of federal health funding to illegal immigrants and non-citizens.
Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNN in an interview Sunday warned that mass federal layoffs will take off if Trump decides the negotiations to reopen government have stalled.
Trump may come under more pressure to negotiate with Democrats if the shutdown drags beyond Oct. 15, the date when members of the military will miss their first paycheck due to the fight in Washington.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) on Sunday pushed back on the claim that Democrats want to steer billions of dollars in health care spending to illegal immigrants, something that has become a top GOP talking point.
“Federal law clearly prohibits the expenditure of taxpayer dollars to provide health care to undocumented immigrants. Period, full stop,” Jeffries said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And no Democrat on Capitol Hill is trying to change that law.”
If the shutdown drags on for more than a month, economic experts warn it could start to have a negative impact on the economy, something that Trump may want to avoid given that a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,083 adults nationwide found that only 36 percent of responds gave him favorable rating on the economy.
Allen Sinai, the chief global economist of Decision Economies, Inc., and a top-rated forecaster, says an extended shutdown would cut into fourth quarter GDP.
“It is a significant recession risk. It looks to like us about a million jobs are going to be furloughed or shed. I think the intent is to fire them forever,” he said. “It’s a portion of the economy.
“If it lasts two weeks to a month, the real GDP forecast I carry for the fourth quarter … will be something on the order of 1 percent. And the first quarter if this goes beyond Christmas, my forecast will turn to a negative GDP,” he said of the economic impact of a shutdown that lasts weeks or months.
Sinai said he is currently forecasting fourth quarter GDP at 2.5 percent growth if the shutdown is resolved quickly.
Democrats feel they are gaining more traction in the shutdown fight after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that White House aides are discussing proposals to extend the enhanced subsidies for ACA insurance plans and don’t want Republicans to get blamed for the subsidies expiring.
Democrats think the shutdown has put more attention on the issue and they’re standing firm against any clean continuing resolution that would reopen the government without extending the enhanced subsidies.
“All we’ve asked is to come to the table and have a discussion,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.).
Rosen dismissed promises from Thune and Johnson to discuss an extension of the health insurance premium subsidies later this year.
“So why should we trust them on anything?” she asked.
Rosen said insurance companies last week and this week are starting to send out notices of premium increases for 2026 to millions of families across the country.
KFF, a nonpartisan health policy and research group, released a poll of more 1,334 adults nationwide Friday showing that 59 percent of Republicans want to extend the enhanced tax credits.
Senate Republican and Democratic sources say that Thune doesn’t feel comfortable making any significant concessions to Democrats without Trump’s direct support for a funding deal.
They note that Trump blew up a bipartisan deal the Senate GOP leader was trying to put together in July and August on more than 140 stalled executive branch nominees.
Democrats say that any deal to reopen the government must include an extension of the enhanced health insurance premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that are due to expire at the end of the year.
Thune said Friday he couldn’t agree to that, taking any deal that would be acceptable to Democratic leaders off the table.
“We can’t make commitments or promises on the COVID subsidies, because that’s not something that we can guarantee that there are the votes there to do,” Thune told reporters.
Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee reached out to their Democratic colleagues on the committee this week in hopes of reaching a deal that would allow eight Democrats to vote for the House-passed bill to reopen government.
They promised that if Democrats allowed the continuing resolution to pass they would immediately go to conference with the House to negotiate a package of three bills funding agriculture, military construction, veterans affairs and the legislative branch, and also bring the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bill — a top Democratic priority — to the Senate floor with the Defense Appropriations measure.
And GOP senators promised to have a “dialogue” with Democrats on extending the enhanced insurance subsidies.
A Republican senator briefed on the talks said they were “very close” to reaching a deal to reopen the government.
But Schumer on Friday dismissed the framework of a deal as unacceptable because it did not address the expiring ACA subsidies in a substantial way.
Sarah Fortinsky and Max Rego contributed.
