White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that layoffs of federal workers will be coming if Democrats in Congress don’t avert a government shutdown by Tuesday.
“There will be if Democrats don’t keep the government open,” Leavitt said, according to The Hill, when asked if layoffs will occur as a result of a shutdown.
Leavitt’s comments come after the White House budget office told federal agencies last week to prepare plans for mass firings and permanent workforce reduction if partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill stalls efforts to reach a stopgap funding deal.
After canceling his last planned meeting with congressional Democrat leadership, President Donald Trump is reportedly set for a Monday meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., in addition to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.
“President Trump has once again agreed to a meeting in the Oval Office. As we have repeatedly said, Democrats will meet anywhere, at any time and with anyone to negotiate a bipartisan spending agreement that meets the needs of the American people,” Schumer and Jeffries said in a joint statement on Saturday night. “We are resolute in our determination to avoid a government shutdown and address the Republican healthcare crisis. Time is running out.”
On Monday morning, Leavitt told reporters that there’s “nothing to negotiate when you have a clean” continuing resolution.
“We are nearing a government shutdown, we are nearing a funding deadline,” she said. “The president wants to make this deadline, he wants to keep this government open.”
The White House’s position going into the meeting is to demand “a commonsense, clean funding resolution … to keep the government open,” Leavitt told “Fox & Friends.”
“The president is giving Democrat leadership one last chance to be reasonable, to come to the White House today to try to talk about this and now is not the time to try to get political points against Donald Trump,” she said.
If government funding runs out by the end of the day on Tuesday, congressional Republicans are adamant that it will be because the Democrats have taken “the federal government as a hostage.”
In an opinion piece published by The Washington Post, Thune said that “there’s a difference between careful discussion and negotiation during the appropriations process and taking government funding hostage to jam more than $1 trillion in big-government spending in a funding bill designed to last mere weeks.”
“Major decisions should not be made in haste,” he wrote. “And they certainly shouldn’t be made because one party is threatening to shut down the government if it doesn’t get its way.”
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