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The U.S. government began shutting down after midnight Wednesday as lawmakers and President Donald Trump failed to resolve a budget impasse in talks dominated by Democratic demands for health care funding.
It is the first shutdown since the record 35-day closure nearly seven years ago and will halt operations at multiple federal departments and agencies, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
Trump accused Democrats of causing the shutdown and threatened to target their priorities and voters during the stoppage.
“So we’d be laying off a lot of people who 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,” suggesting 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 ceased at 12:01 a.m. (0401 GMT) after the Senate failed to approve a short-term funding measure already passed by the House of Representatives.
Hopes of a compromise had dimmed since Monday, when a last-minute White House meeting yielded no progress.
Congress frequently faces budget standoffs but usually avoids shutdowns.
Democrats, though in the minority in both chambers, have been using their leverage eight months into Trump’s second term, which has seen several agencies dismantled.
Trump’s threat of further job cuts deepened anxieties among federal employees after mass layoffs carried out earlier this year by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The Senate requires 60 votes to pass funding bills, seven more than Republicans control.
Republicans had proposed extending current funding until late November while working toward a long-term plan.
Democrats demanded hundreds of billions in restored health care spending, particularly for the Affordable Care Act program for low-income households, which the Trump administration has sought to dismantle.
Almost all Senate Democrats voted against the House-passed seven-week stopgap measure hours before the deadline.
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It remains unclear how long the shutdown will last. Since 1976, when the modern budget process was adopted, the government has shut down 21 times.
Some closures lasted only hours, while the longest began Dec. 22, 2018, when Trump clashed with Democrats over $5.7 billion in border wall funding.
That shutdown furloughed about 380,000 workers and forced 420,000 to work without pay.
This time, the Congressional Budget Office estimates up to 750,000 federal employees could be furloughed daily, with back pay delayed until the shutdown ends.
The shutdown does not affect the Postal Service, military operations, or welfare programs such as Social Security and food stamps.
The Senate was due back in session on Wednesday, but the House is in recess all week, limiting the prospects for swift action.
The Senate will break on Thursday for Yom Kippur, but is expected to reconvene on Friday and could work through the weekend.
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