M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO government shutdown Government shutdown begins as talks falter over Trump’s border wall Roughly 800,000 federal employees are affected by the shutdown, and hundreds of thousands of them could face furloughs over Christmas week if a deal isn't reached quickly.

An array of federal departments shut down on midnight Friday after a last round of negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders failed to break the impasse over funding President Donald Trump's border wall.

It marks the third time this year that the government shut down, although this latest "lapse in appropriations" affects only about one-quarter of the vast federal bureaucracy. Roughly 800,000 federal employees are affected by the shutdown, with half of of them facing furloughs over Christmas week if a deal to fund their agencies and departments isn't reached quickly.



Trump and Democratic congressional leaders launched into a round of fingerpointing over who was to blame for the debacle, although even senior Republicans acknowledged that Trump has shifted his positions repeatedly in the negotiations that preceded the shutdown.


"We're going to have a shutdown. There's nothing we can do about that because we need the Democrats to give us their votes," Trump said in a video posted on Twitter late Friday. "Call it a Democrat shutdown, call it whatever you want."



"The shutdown, hopefully, will not last long," Trump added.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) countered that the shutdown was the result of a Trump "temper tantrum" and insisted they had offered the president "multiple proposals to keep the government open," but to no avail.

"Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. But instead of honoring his responsibility to the American people, President Trump threw a temper tantrum and convinced House Republicans to push our nation into a destructive Trump Shutdown in the middle of the holiday season," Schumer and Pelosi said in a statement.

"President Trump has said more than 25 times that he wanted a shutdown and now he has gotten what he wanted."

The shutdown will hit a number of Cabinet departments, including Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, State, Transportation and Treasury. NASA and the Food and Drug Administration are also affected.

But the full impact of the shutdown won't be felt over the weekend, and both Monday and Tuesday are federal holidays for government employees.

Discussions are expected to continue Saturday, although a breakthrough doesn't appear imminent. Both the House and Senate will be in session, although no votes are scheduled at this time.

Vice President Mike Pence, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner shuttled between congressional offices on Friday night as the talks dragged on, surrounded by a phalanx of U.S. Capitol Police officers, Secret Service agents, and White House aides.

“Will there be a resolution to everything, before midnight? Probably slim,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said as he left the sit-down with the White House officials.

That meeting broke up around 8:30 with no resolution — as had earlier talks — and neither the White House nor congressional leaders have announced any further talks on Saturday.

The Senate earlier voted to advance a House-passed spending bill, if only to keep talks going between Republicans and Democrats over Trump’s demand for $5 billion in new money for his wall.

"The Senate has voted to proceed to the legislation before us in order to preserve maximum flexibility for productive conversations to continue between the White House and our Democratic colleagues. I hope Senate Democrats will work with the White House," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on the floor following one of the longest votes in the chamber's history. McConnell was wearing a button on his suit reading "Cranky Coalition" as he made his announcement.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key player in the budget fight, countered that Trump was never going to get that much money — or any money — for his wall and floated several other plans to break the logjam. Those offers were quickly rejected by the White House.

"As we said to President Trump a week ago, his wall does not have 60 votes here in the Senate, let alone 50 votes," Schumer said. "We are willing to continue discussion" on a proposal that does not fund the border wall.

Senators said the next vote in the chamber will only occur when there's a deal between Trump and congressional leaders.

Pence, Mulvaney and Kushner — at the president's request — came to the Capitol on Friday afternoon as the shutdown clock ticked closer. The trio first huddled with Schumer in the New York Democrat's office. Mulvaney and Pence then met with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), leading to some optimism that political disaster could be averted.

But any hope of an agreement appeared dashed by the early evening. With the likelihood for an agreement fading, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) headed home, saying no further votes were expected in the Senate Friday.

"There aren't going to be any more votes tonight," Cornyn said as he left the Capitol. "You can take that to the bank."

Earlier in the day, GOP Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) met with McConnell and Schumer and struck a procedural agreement that would prevent the Senate from voting on anything other than a bipartisan spending deal. Flake is opposed to the House GOP bill that adds $5 billion for the border wall, saying it has no chance of getting any Senate Democratic support.

Flake changed his vote on the procedural motion from “no“ to “yes,“ and Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) was the only Democrat who voted to proceed.

The vote was held open for more than 5 hours, an extraordinary action in the Senate.

"There is no path forward for the House bill. The only path forward is to a bill that has an agreement between the president and both houses of Congress," Flake warned on the floor. "The next time we vote will be on the agreement, not another test vote."

Friday's talks centered on a proposal to boost border security funding by $1.6 billion, but that money could not be used for Trump's border wall, according to lawmakers and aides. The provision — part of the Homeland Security Department's spending package — would be attached to six other appropriations bills funding the government through Sept. 30. A multi-billion dollar package of disaster aid would also be attached, and there could be as much as $1 billion for added security at U.S. ports of entry, said several sources familiar with the talks.

Trump — who reversed his support for a stopgap funding bill to avert the shutdown since it lacked wall money — would have to publicly commit to backing the package, said the sources.

Ryan and House GOP leaders would also have to bring the measure up for a vote and allow some of their members to vote for it, the sources added.

The proposal was similar to a border security package that Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had offered earlier to Trump. Pelosi has been involved in the discussions, although Schumer was "taking the point" in Friday's discussions, said Democratic aides.

"Leader Schumer reminded them that any proposal with funding for the wall will not pass the Senate," said a Schumer spokesman following the meeting with Pence, Mulvaney and Kushner.

Still, the burden is on Trump to say exactly what he will sign, which wasn't precisely clear when Senate Republicans met with him earlier in the day.

And House Republicans didn't appear all that interested in what Democrats were offering. Ryan and other House GOP leaders had to scramble the day before to get more money for Trump's wall following a revolt by conservative hardliners, who were upset after Senate Republicans agreed to postpone the border-wall fight to early February.

“We’re trying to figure out a way to solve this. Try and figure out what the president’s priority is, what we need for border security and then try to bridge that gap with Leader Schumer," said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is close to Senate GOP leaders.

Though Trump has made clear he won't sign a bill that doesn't include a major boost in border security, Republicans said they thought a deal could still be struck.

Some Republicans said it was up to Schumer to negotiate directly with Trump and get buy-in from Pelosi, as well as the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, which caused the rebellion against a clean spending bill in the first place.

Democrats have offered to support $1.3 billion in funding for fencing, though Republicans believed they might be able to convince Schumer to go up to as much as $1.6 billion, the bipartisan number originally negotiated in the Senate. House Democrats have, so far, rejected that.

Shelby said he directly asked Trump to reconsider the $1.6 billion funding deal in the Thursday afternoon sit down with McConnell and Trump.

“We never reached a number, but the president said to us, he doesn’t want to shut down the government,” Shelby said. He added that Schumer was consulting with Pelosi.

After a GOP lunch on Friday, Republicans said that in a private meeting with senators, Trump took a hard-line but did not give a specific number on what amount of border wall funding might satisfy him.

"I don’t believe a strong sense came out of the meeting," said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). “Mostly a nuclear option and shutdown is acceptable to him, would be the two takeaway points, I think. And the wall matters and will be beautiful when built."

Early Friday, Republicans rejected Trump’s proposal to get rid of the filibuster through the “nuclear option” to fund the border wall, something McConnell has repeatedly said would not happen.

“Mitch, use the Nuclear Option and get it done! Our Country is counting on you!” Trump tweeted on Friday morning.

Republicans hold 51 Senate seats and need at least nine Democrats to pass most legislation, including funds for the border wall. Yet changing the filibuster rules in the waning days of GOP unified control would offer limited short-term gain and major long-term pain whenever Democrats take over on Capitol Hill. And conservatives have historically wielded the filibuster to slow down progressive legislation.

But there are insufficient votes to change the Senate voting rules to a simple majority. Flake and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said they won't vote for a rules change, and neither will Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

Before the deal-making began in earnest Friday, Trump expressed succinctly what was on everyone’s mind: That congressional Democrats and the White House appeared to be in an intractable impasse.

“We are totally prepared for a very long shutdown,” Trump told reporters. And 10 days after declaring he’d be “proud” to take the blame for any shutdown in a fight for border security, he said it was now “totally up to the Democrats.”

Eliana Johnson and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.