The United States entered a budget shutdown situation this morning when the government’s budget officially expired at midnight local time (6:00 a.m. Central European Time), meaning the suspension of activities for a part of the federal administration.
Several hundred thousand civil servants will become technically unemployed, and major disruptions are expected for users of public services while a solution to the current deadlock in Congress between President Donald Trump’s Republicans and the opposition Democrats is awaited.
The government shutdown occurred because the Senate, the upper house of the U.S. Congress, failed to adopt a funding bill, the BBC writes. This is the first government shutdown since 2018-2019 and could lead to a temporary halt of some, but not all, government services.
U.S. President Trump is threatening massive, irreversible layoffs of workers in federal agencies affected by the shutdown.
So-called essential workers will continue to work as usual, some without pay, but other civil servants are now on unpaid leave.
This situation, which last occurred seven years ago, is very unpopular in the U.S., and both sides are already blaming each other for being responsible.
Trump said yesterday afternoon that the Democrats want to shut everything down, not the Republicans, and then adopted a barely concealed threatening tone, saying that they could get rid of many unwanted things this way, and that those would be “Democratic things.”
As Agence France-Presse writes, this is an allusion to the intention to use the freezing of some federal services to carry out the firing of thousands of federal employees, which the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by his former ally Elon Musk, has already started to do.
On the other hand, Democrats accuse Republicans of having no will to negotiate.
The “shutdown” situation is not new to Trump, as the last one was during his first term when the paralysis lasted from December 2018 to January 2019, a record 35 days.
Following the failed budget vote last night, the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, instructed federal agencies to implement the plan for an orderly shutdown.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that around 750,000 federal employees will be placed in a position of technical unemployment.
Air traffic could be affected, and the payment of certain social benefits could be severely disrupted.
According to the Nationwide insurance company’s calculation, each week of paralysis could reduce American annual economic growth by 0.2 percentage points.
Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress, but according to the rules in the Senate, the budget proposal must be adopted with 60 votes out of 100, which, given the current composition of that chamber, requires at least seven Democratic votes.
For now, Republicans are proposing to extend the current budget until the end of November and emphasize that there is no other proposal on the table. On the other hand, Democrats want to achieve the return of hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare spending, especially for the “Obamacare” health program for households, which was abolished by the Donald Trump administration.
In March, when a government shutdown was already looming, Republicans did not want to begin a dialogue about the huge budget cuts decided by the Trump administration. Ten Democratic senators, including the Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, then reluctantly voted for the Republican bill to avoid federal paralysis.
Their decision caused great turmoil among Democrats, and numerous activists and supporters accused them of complying with Donald Trump and his program, which was considered radical.
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Source: N1; Photo: Pexels