The White House intends, next Friday, to direct federal agencies to prepare for a government shutdown after House Republicans left New York for the weekend without a viable plan, to maintain government funding, and avoid politically and economically costly disruption of federal services.
A federal shutdown after September 30 seems certain unless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can convince his hardline wing of Republicans to allow Congress to approve a temporary funding measure to prevent the shutdown as talks continue.
Instead, he launched a more ambitious plan to try to start passing multiple funding bills as soon as the House returns Tuesday, with just five days to resolve the crisis.
According to The Associated Press, McCarthy, a Republican from California, told reporters at the Capitol,” we have made the members work, and we hope that we will be able to move forward Tuesday to pass these bills.
McCarthy indicated that he would prefer to avoid a shutdown, but the hardline wing of his majority in the House of Representatives actually controlled things. “I still think that if you Close, you are in a weaker position,”he said.
The standoff with House Republicans over government funding jeopardizes a range of activities-including salaries for military and law enforcement personnel, food safety and food aid programs, air travel and passport processing – and could devastate the U.S. economy.
White House press secretary Karen Jean-Pierre said yesterday that if federal employees do not get paid, it will be the Republicans ‘ fault. “Our message is: this must not happen .
They can do their job and keep these vital programs going, while keeping the government open,”he said.
With the start of the new fiscal year on the first of October and the lack of funding, the Office of management and budget of the administration of President Joe Biden, is preparing to advise federal agencies to review and update their closure plans, according to an official at the Office of management and budget. The beginning of this process suggests that federal employees can be informed next week if they will be furloughed.
President Biden was quick to blame the potential shutdown on House Republicans, who intend to cut spending beyond those stipulated in the June deal that also suspended the legal cap on government borrowing authority until early 2025.
“They are back at it again, they broke their commitment, they threatened more cuts and threatened to shut down the government again,”Biden said, during a recent speech in a suburb of Maryland.
McCarthy is under enormous pressure to make sharp spending cuts from a group of hard-line conservatives in his caucus, which is essentially stopping his ability to lead the House.
Many on the right side are lining up with Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 election. They opposed the budget deal that the speaker of the House of Representatives reached with Biden, earlier, this year and are trying to dismantle it.
Trump urged Republicans in the House of Representatives to move forward, pushing them to withstand federal spending.
Led by Trump ally Representative Matt Gates, a Republican from Florida, the right wing dominated the House debate in a public rebuke of the speaker.
Late on Thursday, the hardline faction pushed McCarthy to consider his idea to postpone plans for a temporary funding measure, called the continuing resolution, or CR, and instead begin tabling the 12 individual bills needed to fund the government.
The leadership of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives then announced that it would begin to process a package of four bills to finance defense, homeland security, foreign affairs, foreign operations and agriculture, leading to a vote on Tuesday when lawmakers return. Work on some bills has been postponed by the Conservatives themselves, who are now demanding their passage.
“Any progress we are making is in spite of McCarthy, not because of him,” Gates wrote on social media, mocking the speaker for sending lawmakers home for the weekend.
Gates and his allies say they want to see the House engaged in the arduous work of legislating-even if it pushes the country into a shutdown – while they seek deep cuts and reductions.
The House Rules Committee was holding a session yesterday afternoon to begin preparing those bills, which historically require weeks of discussion, with hundreds of amendments, but are now scheduled to be put to a vote next week. The committee is expected to conclude its work on Saturday.
It is the culmination of a difficult week for McCarthy who tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce the very popular defense spending bill that was rejected twice in embarrassing votes. The speaker appeared to blame the defeat of the bill on his fellow lawmakers “who just want to burn the whole place down”.
McCarthy’s top allies, including Representative Garrett Graves, Republican of Los Angeles, insisted yesterday that they are still working to achieve both parties-passing annual spending bills and lobbying for CR with border security provisions – in time to prevent a shutdown.
Shutdowns occur when Congress and the president fail to complete a package of 12 spending bills, or fail to approve a temporary measure to keep the government running. As a result, federal agencies have to stop all actions that are considered unnecessary. Since 1976, there have been 22 funding gaps, ten of which have led to workers being granted leave.
The last and longest ever shutdown was for 35 days during the Trump administration, between 2018 and 2019, where he insisted on funding for the construction of a wall along the southern border of the United States, which Democrats and some Republicans rejected.
Since some agencies have already approved funding, it was a partial closure. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost amounted to three billion dollars for the US economy. While three billion dollars is a big amount, it was equivalent to only 0.02 percent of U.S. economic activity in 2019.
There can be costs for parts of the economy and difficulties for individuals.
Military and law enforcement officials will not be paid during the lockdown period. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund could be depleted, hurting victims of wildfires, hurricanes and floods.
Clinical trials of new prescription drugs may be delayed. Ten thousand children may lose access to care through the Head Start program, while environmental and food safety inspections may be delayed.
Food aid to Americans through the Women, Infants and children program could also be cut off for nearly seven million pregnant women, mothers, infants and children.
Brian Gardner, chief Washington strategist at investment bank Stifel, said air traffic controllers had largely continued to work without pay during the previous lockdown.
He noted that Visa and passport applications will not be processed if the government is closed.
The American Travel Industry Association estimates that the travel sector could lose 140 million dollars a day in the event of a shutdown.
But in a sign of how little damage the 35-day shutdown has done to the overall economy, the S & P 500 stock index rose 11.6 percent during the recent government shutdown.
