A bipartisan group of senators is already looking for a way out of the government shutdown.

The talks, which played out on the Senate floor Wednesday as lawmakers again voted down dueling partisan funding bills, are still in their early stages. Multiple lawmakers involved said they aren’t close to finalizing a proposal.

But the nascent “gang,” as ad hoc bipartisan Senate groups are often called, is the most promising route out of the shutdown in its early hours.

Among the ideas being floated by the members involved are passing a shorter-term stopgap than the seven-week measure passed by the House, as well as possible assurances that Republicans are willing to compromise on extending soon-to-expire health insurance subsidies.

There was lots of “spitballing,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who was part of the floor huddle, told reporters afterward. The goal is to provide some “room” to discuss a “Plan B” that some Democrats are seeking, he added.

Shortening the length of the funding punt could be a hard sell for Republicans, who are skeptical a deal on the insurance subsidies can be quickly notched. The House-passed continuing resolution would expire on Nov. 21, a few days before Thanksgiving.

“I think we’re better off to pass the CR to the 21st and get back to work on appropriations bills,” said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), shortly after he huddled with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) off the floor.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who is involved in the talks, also said a roughly 45-day bill would “suffice” and that there was “nothing wrong with trying to get more work done before in less than 45 days.”

Still, senators of both parties hailed the “productive discussion,” as Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) called it, and pledged to keep lines of communication open in the coming days. The Senate is not expected to vote again until Friday, after the Yom Kippur holiday.

Kaine said both Democrats’ health care demand and President Donald Trump’s ability to unilaterally rescind congressionally approved funding came up in the floor chat. Some Democrats want Trump’s power to rescind approved spending curtailed while negotiations play out.

“We’re talking about both, and there are good discussions going on,” Kaine said, adding that senators need a “path” for making health care fixes.

Conversations have been happening quietly among multiple members of the Senate rank-and-file for days as their party leaders remained at loggerheads. Now, with the government shut down for the first time since 2019, they are quickly gaining steam.

The backdrop is an aggressive effort from the Trump administration to pressure congressional Democrats, including threats Wednesday to withhold funding for crucial transportation projects in New York and to proceed with the mass firings of federal workers.

White House budget director Russ Vought told House Republicans on a private call Wednesday that the administration will start those layoffs “in a day or two,” according to four people on the call granted anonymity to describe it.

But there are still major sticking points. Senate Majority Leader John Thune insisted Wednesday that there would be no escape hatch into negotiations so long as the House-passed stopgap remains unpassed. There’s no indication, either, that Speaker Mike Johnson would be willing to sign off on a Senate-brokered deal or advance it through the House.

“People were looking for a way out, but the way out is to open up the government,” Thune told reporters Wednesday.

Democratic leaders immediately touted the bipartisan talks. “We’ve always believed that Democrats and Republicans should sit down to negotiate,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters. “It’s a good thing.”

While Republicans insist they will not negotiate on extending the insurance subsidies while the government is shut down, some GOP senators have suggested they could work out a framework for how the “mechanics” of the talks would go once the government is reopened to try to offer more reassurances to Democrats.

Some Republicans are also discussing dealing with the subsidies — enhanced tax credits under the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire Dec. 31 — as part of the larger appropriations process. Some senators want a deal on the issue by Nov. 1, when open enrollment for ACA plans begins, according to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who participated in the floor discussion.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he mostly “listened” in the floor huddle. But he said establishing some sort of framework for an extension of the tax credits — after reopening the government — was “part of what’s being discussed.”

While some Democrats — such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — have demanded any ACA extension get written into “ironclad” legislation as part of any deal, several Senate Democrats have been careful not to demand that the matter has to be added into a temporary stopgap.

Beyond passing a shutdown-ending funding punt, senators are also discussing the larger fiscal 2026 funding process, including moving a package of full-year spending bills that have stalled amid the shutdown fight. One idea is pairing Defense Department funding, a top priority for Republicans, with Health and Human Services funding, a top priority for Democrats.

One small think tank is driving health policy within the GOP. It has also created friction on Capitol Hill and in the White House as Republicans clash over the future of Obamacare.

Paragon Health Institute was established in 2021 and has only 11 full-time staffers, but founder Brian Blase is credited with formulating many of the proposals that became the basis for nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts enacted as part of the GOP megabill. The group’s success is thanks in large part to its vast alumni network spread out across the highest levels of government, from the speaker’s office to the Trump administration.

Now Blase is looking to exert his clout again, mounting a fierce campaign to convince lawmakers to let enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits expire at the end of the year. Democrats have made an extension of the boosted Obamacare subsidies, first approved by Congress in 2021, as their centerpiece demand in the current government funding fight. Republicans need to figure out if they’re willing to deal — and Paragon doesn’t want them to bend at all.

“Brian is exceptionally smart, principled, and motivated by good intentions,” said Paul Winfree, the president and CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Center — another conservative think tank — who served as a top economic official in the first Trump White House. “He truly wants to solve problems in health policy and believes — I think correctly — that the government is the cause of many of them.”

But Paragon is making a key segment of congressional Republicans uncomfortable, according to interviews with a dozen House GOP lawmakers, senior aides, White House officials and people close to the administration, many of whom were granted anonymity to provide their candid views or describe private conversations.

Though conservatives are largely complimentary of the think tank, a swath of House Republicans, including some of the conference’s most vulnerable incumbents, privately say Paragon is dead-set on notching conservative policy wins irrespective of the damage they might do to the GOP’s fragile majority in the midterms.

“Kind of feels like they’re giving Brian Blase the keys to the castle,” said an aide to a moderate House Republican of the access given to Paragon on Capitol Hill.

As a government shutdown begins with few off-ramps in sight, Republicans soon will have to make a choice about how closely to heed Paragon’s advice. They have already been working to overcome negative messaging around the drastic Medicaid cuts in their sprawling tax and spending package from over the summer. Now, they’re confronting warnings from pollsters, advisers and vulnerable incumbents that allowing the ACA subsidies to expire at the end of the year will cause out-of pocket insurance premiums to skyrocket and kick millions of people off their health coverage.

Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee and a practicing surgeon, said Paragon brings a “30,000 foot view” to the health policy debate. But, he added, “Does that always translate to what’s better for patients? … I don’t know.”

A presence on the Hill

Mindful of the possible political blowback from inaction, at least a dozen moderate House Republicans support a one-year extension of the subsidies. Some GOP senators are working on their own proposal.

Yet Paragon is forging ahead with its crusade to kill the credits outright. It complains about the cost — an estimated $350 billion through 2035 if extended permanently — and argues the subsidies have proven to be a huge windfall for the health insurance industry. The group also contends Obamacare itself is rife with fraud and “phantom enrollment” — scenarios where people are on health plans but don’t file any medical claims.

The talking points are flowing directly to congressional conservatives. The Republican Study Committee hosted Blase and members of his team for a staff briefing in August on the expiring subsidies, which was followed by a Paragon-led Hill briefing in September featuring remarks from a top health policy adviser on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Paragon isn’t alone in pushing for the Obamacare subsidies to expire. The Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity are among other prominent conservative groups pushing against an extension, while anti-abortion advocates oppose the tax credits because they cover the costs of terminating pregnancies.

But Paragon’s uniquely close relationship with lawmakers has unnerved many House GOP centrists. Some of them raised concerns with senior members of their party when Blase presented at the RSC staff briefing, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

“We had to hold these people off once before; we will do it again,” said one moderate House Republican who favors an extension, referring to how colleagues successfully mobilized their conference in resisting Paragon’s megabill proposals for even deeper Medicaid cuts.

A spokesperson for the RSC did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Blase said that “Paragon did not draft any language on Medicaid provisions” in the GOP’s new tax and spending law. But Paragon did play a leading role in building support for two major changes to Medicaid payments to states.

One proposal limited the states’ use of provider taxes, the revenue from which allows hospitals to get higher Medicaid payments at federal expense. Paragon derided the status quo as a form of “money laundering.” The group also pushed for a new cap on state-directed payments, which enables states to better direct Medicaid dollars; Paragon said the program lacked transparency.

Paragon’s influence was quiet but not completely unseen: PDF metadata revealed that Blase was the author of a letter the hard-right House Freedom Caucus circulated in May calling for more aggressive Medicaid cuts.

Ultimately, Congress didn’t go as far as Paragon wanted on either priority. But the final provisions were lauded as historic achievements among conservative health policy wonks — and continue to cause political headaches for Republicans in swing districts.

An administration divide

Blase, who holds a doctorate in economics and was special assistant to the president for economic policy during the first Trump administration, disputed the suggestion that Paragon is touting controversial positions. In his statement, he pointed to a recent, Paragon-commissioned poll showing a majority of voters want the enhanced subsidies for insurance premiums to expire.

“We appreciate the difficulty that leaders have in shepherding legislation through Congress,” said Blase. “That’s why President Trump, Speaker [Mike] Johnson, [Senate Majority] Leader [John] Thune and members and staff involved with the reforms of the past year deserve enormous credit for enacting the most meaningful health policy reforms in a generation.”

When asked to address concerns from some vulnerable Republicans about letting the ACA subsidies expire, Blase replied that premiums would rise anyway as a result of “flaws in the original design of Obamacare” and that Congress could respond by pursuing other legislative overhauls of the American health care system.

Just as Paragon is driving an ideological split among Republicans on Capitol Hill, a similar dynamic has played out inside the White House over the future of the ACA credits.

According to five people familiar with administration dynamics, including two White House officials, Paragon alumnus Theo Merkel — who now serves as a senior domestic policy adviser at the White House — hasn’t seen eye-to-eye on the issue with members of Trump’s political team and other influential political advisors close to the administration.

That includes White House deputy chief of staff James Blair and Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, who are more of the mind that extending the credits in some form would be politically advantageous for Republicans, those people said.

While Trump has not yet come out publicly for or against extending the subsidies, he privately said he was willing to negotiate on the matter and other health care proposals during a closed-door meeting with Democratic leaders Monday. Fabrizio in July touted findings in a poll published by his firm showing that a failure to preserve the credits “could hand the GOP majority to Democrats.” He did not respond to a request for comment.

Merkel, however, has been promoting the Paragon view that the subsidies are bad policy in meetings with staff and lawmakers. While still at the think tank in September 2024, he testified before the Senate Finance Committee that the credits amounted to “paying insurers more to hide the flaws of the ACA” and should be “allowed to expire.”

“Generally speaking, the political people want it, and the policy people don’t,” said one of the people aware of internal conversations taking place inside the administration.

A House Republican aide described Merkel and Corey Ensslin — another domestic policy advisor in the administration who has been working on the ACA policy — as “conservative brainiac guys” who “don’t give a shit about politics.”

Merkel and Ensslin do appear to be coming around to the political demands of their current jobs, however, as the White House is privately readying a variety of options around the ACA subsidy issue, according to two other people with direct knowledge of the matter.

When reached for comment, Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, declined to share the Trump administration’s current stance on the matter of a subsidies extension but denied there was a rift inside the president’s circle.

“Every member of the Trump White House is playing from one playbook — President Trump’s playbook,” he said in a statement. “The idea that there is any daylight between Special Assistant Merkel and Deputy Chief of Staff Blair is completely fake news.”

Far-reaching influence 

Blase said in his statement he founded Paragon to provide “high quality research” and “show how important incentives are in health care” — while also “expos[ing] the incentives that reward the manipulation of government programs to draw down more funding and more corporate welfare.”

Regarding the expanded ACA subsidies, Paragon says its research shows the enhanced subsidies have led to the improper enrollment of more than 25 percent of all individuals with insurance through Obamacare marketplaces — more than 6 million people.

The conservative activist orbit has responded favorably to Paragon’s work. According to tax records obtained by InfluenceWatch, Stand Together — a right-leaning organization connected to Charles Koch — donated $2 million in 2021; the 85 Fund, which has ties to the conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, gave $1 million in 2022.

Paragon’s influence is also reflected in its alumni network, with think tank veterans now serving in prominent places throughout the Trump administration — from Merkel at the Domestic Policy Council to Abe Sutton, who leads the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, and Marty Makary, the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

Joel Zinberg, a former director for a public health initiative at Paragon, was tapped by Trump in January to serve on the National Economic Council with a focus on health care and deregulation.

Paragon itself also counts several health policy heavyweights among its advisers, including the Economic Policy Innovation Center’s Winfree, American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Tevi Troy.

Other alumni have regularly cycled in and out of GOP congressional leaders’ offices as senior health policy advisors. For instance, Johnson brought on Drew Keyes, a former senior policy analyst at Paragon, to be his senior policy advisor in 2023 following his ascension to the speakership.

Keyes took the spot formerly held by Ryan Long, the senior policy advisor to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted before Johnson won the gavel. Now Long serves as director of congressional relations at Paragon and has spoken to Republicans in at least one Hill briefing this fall on the expiration of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies.

Johnson said in an interview with Fox Business over the weekend he thinks the subsidies are “bad policy.”

Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, a member of House GOP leadership, said Paragon has been effective in highlighting the message that the enhanced subsidies were intended as Covid-era relief, not a permanent tax credit.

“Democrats and reporters, from time to time, forget about what the premise was,” said Hern. “And so Paragon does a great job of reminding us of the policy conversation at that time.”

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a vocal member of the Freedom Caucus, said Paragon adds “a lot of value because they get the health care issue in figuring out ways to manage the problems created by the obviously failing ACA and subsidies.”

“Brian and the guys have been publicly talking about this stuff,” Roy continued. “We are having conversations.”

Washington is waking up to its first government shutdown in nearly seven years. How many more days that will be the case, no one knows.

With President Donald Trump and congressional leaders not actively negotiating, there’s no sign the shutdown will be over before the end of the day. And with Congress dormant for Thursday’s Yom Kippur holiday, that all but ensures it will go until at least Friday if not far beyond.

Instead, Congress is poised to enact a reprise performance Wednesday: The Senate will vote on, and likely reject, dueling stopgap proposals for a third time, while House Democrats hold another closed-door meeting and House Republicans do not plan to return to the Capitol until next week at the earliest.

Leaders of both parties are digging in for a lengthy battle — ramping up the blame game and putting the onus on their political opponents to blink if they are going to quickly find a way to reopen shuttered agencies.

“It’s in their court to solve it — it’s their shutdown,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of Republicans Tuesday.

“We are not going to be held hostage,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. “There isn’t anything here to negotiate.”

Fueling the stalemate are perverse political incentives. Both parties believe the other will face a bigger voter backlash over the shutdown. Democrats are banking on Republicans shouldering the blame because they control the levers of power in Washington.

Under pressure from their base to show they are fighting Trump, they spent months honing a strategy to make health care, including extending insurance subsidies set to lapse at the end of the year, the centerpiece of their message going into this shutdown and next year’s midterm elections.

But Republicans are warning that if Democrats are banking on them quickly caving, they will be waiting — and agencies will be hamstrung — for quite some time. GOP leaders are set to hold a morning news conference outside the Capitol Wednesday to hammer Democrats and reiterate that there is one path out of the shutdown: a House-passed seven-week funding punt.

Asked if he was ruling out any talks on Democrats’ health care demands, Thune said, “The negotiation happens when the government opens.”

The trench warfare has lawmakers openly questioning whether they can find a way out of the showdown anytime soon. The atmosphere in the Capitol has darkened from just 48 hours ago when senators and aides were holding out faint hope that an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Democratic leaders would help shake loose some progress toward a deal.

Instead, the meeting produced no outward progress, and Trump has since poisoned the well by posting inflammatory deepfake videos depicting Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he hoped a shutdown would be “short” as he cast doubt on Schumer’s ability to hold Senate Democrats together indefinitely.

“I don’t believe that 47 Democratic senators are going to want to walk the plank,” he said.

Republicans got a boost Tuesday night when Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to vote for the GOP-led House bill. Republicans are hoping they will be able to peel off five more Democrats as the shutdown continues, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) among the senators they’re watching closely.

King critiqued the push from some corners of the Democratic base to use the shutdown battle to fight Trump, saying in a video explaining his vote that the “irony, the paradox, is by shutting the government, we’re actually giving Donald Trump more power.”

Thune left the door open for talks with Schumer after Tuesday’s votes, noting that the New York Democrat knows how to get a hold of him. But any conversations would happen against a backdrop of mounting political pressure.

Republicans will force a vote again Wednesday on their funding bill and plan to keep calling up the bill almost daily — including through this coming weekend — to try to squeeze the opposition. Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow House GOP leaders, meanwhile, are still mulling how to extract maximum pain from Democrats, including debating whether they’ll return next week as previously advised, according to two people granted anonymity to describe private deliberations.

Top Republicans, the people said, are wary of bringing the House back without a legislative fix to vote on and are also discussing what votes they could potentially force Democrats to take to inflict more political pain.

Senate Democrats have also been privately debating what steps they can take during a shutdown to try to keep pressure on Republicans and potentially create an off-ramp, according to two other people granted anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

Schumer remained unbowed after Tuesday night’s vote, saying “Republicans have failed to get enough votes to avoid a shutdown. They’ve got to sit down and negotiate with Democrats.”

But pressed on whether he could guarantee his caucus would stick together against the GOP bill, Schumer was less than definite: “The bottom line is, our guarantee is to the American people that we are going to fight as hard as we can for their health care,” he said.

While leadership-level relations stay chilly, rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats have engaged in quiet talks about possible paths out of the shutdown. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said it might be time to bring back the “talking stick,” an object passed around in bipartisan meetings of senators who helped end a brief shutdown in early 2018.

“I still have it,” a smiling Collins said.

Cortez Masto told reporters after her vote on Tuesday night that she’s “open to working with my colleagues across the aisle to extend the credits if that helps open the government again.”

Part of the discussions include potential reassurances on the Affordable Care Act credits that are key for Democrats. Other Republican senators are floating trial balloon olive branches to their Democratic colleagues.

Those talks, so far, haven’t reached critical mass. And some Republicans who support extending the credits worry the shutdown will make an eventual deal more complicated.

“This will put that on ice for a while,” said Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the Republicans who favors an extension. “I think the length of the shutdown will affect that. … Once you go off the cliff it’s hard to come back.”

Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor contributed to this report.

As Washington enters a government shutdown, the Trump administration has erected safeguards to ensure President Donald Trump’s most hardline priorities continue unscathed.

Agencies central to Trump’s agenda are shielding certain programs by declaring the federal employees who work on them essential or sheltering them under already approved funding streams — designations that will allow them to keep running through the funding lapse.

That means offices tasked with immigration enforcement and tariff negotiations, two hallmarks of Trump’s presidency, will retain significantly more staff than they have in prior shutdowns, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency documents submitted to the White House in recent days and interviews with current and former administration officials. That’s even as hundreds of thousands of federal workers are sent home, hampering a variety of government functions including some routine food safety inspections, Social Security benefit verifications and the publication of employment numbers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The split underscores how Trump hopes to punish Democrats by pinning the fallout on them while ensuring his own priorities continue unimpeded. It’s also the latest example of how his administration uses the levers of federal power in unprecedented ways to enact the president’s expansive policy agenda.

“Remember Rahm Emanuel’s great quote: ‘You should never waste a crisis,’” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Rahm Emanuel should be proud of the Trump team because they’re prepared to say, ‘Every day this is shut, we will find ways to pay for everything we want. We’ll find ways to eliminate everything you want. And we’ll do it legally.’”

Some of Trump’s pet projects, like NASA’s Artemis moonshot program, will continue during the shutdown. So will some major GOP policy priorities, such as processing Interior Department applications for permits to drill or conduct fossil fuel projects.

One first-term Trump official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the administration will be “strategic” in its approach on what to fund.

“If something is going to put a kink in Trump’s agenda even for a couple of days, they will find a creative way to make that work,” the official said.

Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have made preparations to use the shutdown to conduct yet another mass culling of the federal workforce. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, tried to use the shutdown threat to force talks on extending soon-to-expire health insurance subsidies.

“The last person that wants to shut down is us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Now, with that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible — that are bad for them and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out. Cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

While the party controlling Washington typically suffers politically during a shutdown, polling shows significant peril for Democrats: A new New York Times-Siena College poll found that 65 percent of respondents, including 43 percent of Democrats, think Democrats shouldn’t allow a government shutdown, even if their demands aren’t met.

White House aides are confident that their preparations will help them weather the shutdown storm while Democrats bear the brunt of the fallout from angry federal workers and constituents.

“There are already approved appropriations, some part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, that will not lapse as part of a government shutdown the way that other funding will. It’s less so that the administration is trying to somehow manipulate this,” said a White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the administration’s strategy. “We want everything to continue, but ultimately when there is a shutdown, some funding will lapse. And there is nothing we can do about that. That is 100 percent on the Democrats.”

All core immigration enforcement operations — from Border Patrol to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will continue without interruption, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss agency planning. Law enforcement personnel in past shutdowns have been considered essential, but ICE, for example, is further buffered by mandatory funding included in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

New agents hired under Republicans’ tax and domestic policy law will continue to be paid. But the agency is also working to ensure other law enforcement officials — who would otherwise not be paid until Congress passes a new funding bill — can get paid via OBBB funding, one of the officials said. The agency is also prepared to furlough less staff than in years past to ensure the administration’s work to implement the bill isn’t delayed.

“ICE will be fine during a shutdown,” said one of the administration officials. “Most of what ICE does will continue.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s 2025 shutdown plan calls for a higher percentage of its total employees to be retained during a shutdown than its 2023 plan — 95 percent now compared to 88 percent two years ago. DHS in its 2025 plan also expanded the number of employees it can retain by law during a shutdown by roughly 2,300.

Trump’s signature tariff agenda also stands to continue uninterrupted as his administration pushes forward high-stakes trade talks with China and India and hashes out a host of other deals, like those with Japan and South Korea. Both the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office make clear in their shutdown plans that they will continue advancing the president’s trade agenda, a departure from previous years when trade was largely deemed a non-essential function that could be put on the backburner during a shutdown.

Commerce, for instance, is allowing import licensing for steel and aluminium products, investigations around sector-based tariffs and export control activities to continue without exception, none of which were explicitly protected activities in its 2023 shutdown plan.

USTR, meanwhile, plans to continue administering tariff programs established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, according to a draft plan posted and removed from its website in recent days. While those tariffs are being challenged in court, the Trump administration has declared trade deficits with other countries a threat to national security, a rationale USTR is also using in its decision to continue trade talks.

USTR is also retaining 60 percent of its workforce during a shutdown, compared to just 40 percent in its 2024 plan. Last year, the agency said that only four full-time employees were required to carry out necessary duties during a shutdown compared to 118 employees that received such a designation this year, nearly half of USTR’s staff.

While Trump has indicated that his administration intends to inflict pain on Democrats, there are limits to how much it can do without hurting GOP voters.

“To hit blue states specifically, you’d want to target the federal bureaucracy — which is primarily represented by Dems. That’s what I think the mass firings are all about — max pain on Dems,” the first-term Trump official said. “Otherwise, I don’t see a lot that can be done to Dems that wouldn’t hurt [Republican] states.”

And despite instructions from Vought, the White House budget director, that agencies prepare reduction-in-force plans for a shutdown, most plans continue to detail only the number of workers it plans to furlough, not specifics for permanent firings.

While the administration worked to safeguard its favored programs, plenty of other functions across the government are frozen.The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, is suspending all operations — including the release of the monthly jobs report that often serves as a key indicator of the economy’s health. While such a provision has been included in previous shutdown plans, it is noteworthy in the current climate after Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer following a disappointing jobs report — and as economic anxiety remains high.

The Food and Drug Administration’s Animal Drugs and Foods Program is halting pre-market safety reviews of novel animal food ingredients for livestock, and “thus be unable to ensure that the meat, milk, and eggs of livestock are safe for people to eat.”

The federal government shut down early Wednesday morning, setting up a potentially lengthy stand-off without a clear path forward to fund the government after top congressional leaders did not meet to try to find a last-minute deal in the hours before the shutdown.

Leaders from both parties braced for an imminent shutdown by casting blame on their opposite party one day after President Donald Trump initially signaled an openness to negotiating an extension of soon-to-expire health care subsidies in exchange for Democratic support on a funding bill — shortly before insulting Democratic leaders on social media.

The impasse means 750,000 federal employees could face furloughs, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. Some of those employees could be targets of the White House’s plan to permanently fire more federal employees, Trump and other administration officials warned.

“The last thing we want to do is shut it down, but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, hours before the government funding lapsed. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”

The Office of Management and Budget formally directed agencies to begin shutting down their operations Tuesday evening, while accusing Democrats of adopting an “unteneble posture” that is “making the duration of the shutdown difficult to predict.”

No federal appropriations bills have been passed for the new fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, marking the first full federal shutdown since 2013. In his first term, Trump oversaw three partial shutdowns, the longest stretching 35 days from December 2018 to January 2019.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune joined House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer at the White House on Monday to meet with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials. During the meeting, Trump expressed a willingness to discuss extending the Obamacare tax credits, a demand Democrats have made for their votes on a continuing resolution.

“I asked the Democrat representatives, ‘What do you think about coming up with a better health care?’” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Some Republicans have floated compromises, but insisted the government must be funded first. Vance told reporters after Monday’s meeting with Democratic leaders that any talks on health care subsidies would need to happen in the “context of an open government.”

On Tuesday, Johnson called the Democrats’ demand to extend Obamacare tax credits a “red herring.”

The distance grew further between the two sides after Trump posted an altered video featuring Jeffries wearing a fake mustache and sombrero while speaking alongside Schumer outside the White House — a heightening of Republicans’ line of attack that Democrats are withholding government funding to secure health care benefits for undocumented immigrants. The video contained fake audio of Schumer saying the only way for Democrats to get votes was to attract “illegal aliens.”

Jeffries slammed the video as “bigotry.” Trump then posted a second similar video Tuesday.

The GOP tactic fixates on a separate proposal from Democrats to roll back parts of the Republican-passed domestic policy agenda package, which includes restrictions on non-citizens from accessing federal benefits. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for health care coverage through Affordable Care Act plans, and Democrats are looking to extend subsidies in exchange for votes to open the government.

Trump re-emphasized that in an interview with POLITICO on Monday, while also avoiding blame for the shutdown. Recent polling from PBS News/NPR/Marist has suggested voters are more likely to blame Republicans than Democrats for a shutdown, while a New York Times/Siena poll found most voters believed Democrats should not “shut down the government, even if their demands are not met.”

“I don’t worry about that,” Trump told POLITICO, “because people that are smart see what’s happening. The Democrats are deranged.”

The White House has said it will leverage the shutdown to further its restructuring of the federal government. A memo distributed by OMB to federal agencies requested they identify programs backed by discretionary funds so the White House can permanently eliminate those that do not align with Trump’s priorities.

The move would be an unprecedented handling of a government shutdown. Non-essential federal workers typically face temporary furloughs and are brought back to work once Congress restores federal funding.

The Senate failed to pass a Republican stopgap proposal and a Democratic funding bill Tuesday evening. The GOP proposal received votes from two Democrats — Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto — and independent Maine Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats. Republicans voted down the Democratic bill along party lines.

Thune told reporters after the vote he intends to continue scheduling regular votes on the short-term continuing resolution, hoping to pressure Senate Democrats to back the measure. He added that he doesn’t want to negotiate on health care subsidies while the government is shut down.

“We need to keep the government open, we can talk about whatever else they want to talk about after that,” he said Tuesday.

No talks are currently scheduled between congressional leaders.

Johnson has yet to call the House into session, indicating an agreement is yet to arrive soon. He said in a interview on CNN Tuesday evening he expects House Republicans to return to the Capitol next week.

Jeffries has said he plans to keep House Democrats in Washington for the remainder of the week.

“This is not simply a negotiating tactic,” Jeffries said in a CNN interview Monday evening. “We are ready to find a bipartisan agreement. But that bipartisan agreement needs to address the health care crisis that exists in the United States of America.”

A government shutdown is now all but inevitable.

Senators rejected dueling spending stopgap bills on Tuesday, including aHouse-passed continuing resolution that was the final off-ramp to avoid a government shutdown set to start at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.

There’s no sign of any further breakthrough that could avert a shutdown before midnight — and even if there was, it would be next to impossible for lawmakers to act on it. Quick Senate action would require the consent of all 100 senators, and passing anything other than the House-approved CR would require the other chamber to act.

Speaker Mike Johnson sent his members home until Monday in a bid to pressure the Senate to swallow what the House already passed: a seven-week punt. Minutes after the failed vote on that bill Tuesday, the White House budget office issued a memo directing agencies to “execute their plans for an orderly shutdown” at midnight.

Faced with the impasse, lawmakers and the White House spent Tuesday trading barbs over who was to blame for the first government closure since 2019.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said ahead of the vote that Democrats would “have the same leverage on Nov. 21,” when the House-passed measure expires: “This is a short-term CR, this is the same thing we do all the time, it funds the government until Nov. 21.”

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, quickly retorted that Thune “did not come to me one time to say, ‘Is this bill acceptable? What do you want in the bill?’ They call it bipartisan. It is not. That is not how you negotiate. That is not how you pass appropriations bills.”

Just as party leaders were unable to find a mutually agreeable off-ramp ahead of the shutdown, they aren’t anywhere close to an agreement on how to get out of it.

Senate Republicans believe they have the upper hand because they are asking for Democrats to vote on a “clean” short-term punt — similar to proposals Democrats have supported in the past. They were encouraged Tuesday when the House-passed bill failed on the Senate floor in an 55-45 vote Tuesday — with three Democrats voting for it.

That was a better showing for the GOP than in a prior vote 11 days ago, when Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was the only Democrat to join with Republicans. This time Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto and Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, joined him. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was the only Republican voting no.

“We should be working on bipartisan solutions to address the global health care crisis, but that doesn’t mean we should be swapping harm from one group of Americans to another,” Cortez-Masto told reporters amid the vote.

Trump is warning he will make the shutdown particularly painful for Democrats, with GOP lawmakers expecting blue states to be hardest hit given the flexibility the administration has in determining what federal agencies and programs are essential.

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them — like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” Trump warned Tuesday in the Oval Office.

The president even suggested that medical programs and benefits could be casualties of the shutdown. “We can cut large numbers of people out,” Trump said, even though programs like Medicaid and Medicare are funded permanently and can continue operating during a shutdown.

White House Budget Chief Chief Russ Vought has also threatened toengage in mass layoffs of federal workers during a shutdown, in addition to the usual temporary furloughs.

Responding to a letter from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the Congressional Budget Officeestimated Tuesday that about 750,000 employees could be furloughed each day and that the total daily cost of their compensation would be roughly $400 million. The nonpartisan scorekeeper previously estimated that about $3 billion in lost real GDP would never be recovered after the record 35-day government shutdown that ended in 2019.

House Democrats returned to Washington Monday to draw a contrast with the House GOP’s absence. Democratic leaders are planning a full-bore messaging campaign through the week with multiple daily news conferences and events, focused on their demand for a bipartisan negotiation over health care.

Before voting down the House-passed stopgap Tuesday evening, the Senate again defeated a counterproposal from Democrats that would fund the government through Oct. 31 and reverse $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid from the GOP tax and spending megabill, while also permanently extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire.

TheDemocrats’ bill would also restrict the president’s authority to withhold congressionally approved funding — akey fault line for many Democrats, who are not inclined to ink any spending deal with Republicans if Trump can simply not adhere to it.

While Senate Republicans have signaled support for negotiating on the ACA credits — a few of them have even endorsed a one-year extension — they believe any deal has to wait until after the government reopens.

This is the second time in a matter of weeks that both short-term funding bills have been voted on by the Senate, and failed. Senate Democrats used a closed-door lunch on Tuesday to discuss what would come next after the dueling stopgap bills failed.

Thune said he expected to hold yet another vote Wednesday on the GOP bill to continue putting pressure on Democrats to blink.

“At some point, they’re just going to need to keep voting it down,” he told reporters. “There are ways to trigger those votes. And we’ll keep looking for those opportunities. So they’ll get the opportunity to vote.”

Cassandra Dumay and Calen Razor contributed to this report.