The US government has shut down for the first time in almost seven years after members of Congress failed to agree on a last-ditch funding deal.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers deemed not essential for protecting people or property, such as law enforcement personnel – could be furloughed or laid off after the shutdown began at midnight.
Critical services, including social security payments and the postal service, will keep operating but may suffer from worker shortages, while national parks and museums could be among the sectors that close completely.
It comes after rival Democrats and Republicans refused to budge in their stand-off over healthcare spending.
A Democrat-led proposal to keep the government funded went down by 53 votes to 47 in the Senate, before the Republicans’ one notched up 55 in favour – five short of the threshold needed to avert a shutdown.
Unlike legislation, a simple majority isn’t enough to pass a government funding bill
Following the votes in Washington DC on Tuesday night, the White House’s budget office confirmed the shutdown would happen and said affected agencies “should now execute their plans”.
It blamed the Democrats, describing their position as “untenable”. The opposition party wants to reverse cuts to the government’s health insurance programme, Medicaid, which were passed earlier this summer.
Senate majority leader John Thune, a Republican, accused the Democrats of taking federal workers “hostage”.
His Democrat counterpart, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, said the Republicans’ funding package “does absolutely nothing to solve the biggest health care crisis in America”.
President Donald Trump has threatened mass firings and the cutting of some federal benefits that he said were important to Democrats.
He blamed Democrats for the standoff and threatened to carry out mass firings of government employees and cut government programmes and services that he says are important to Democrats if a shutdown occurred.
“The last thing we want to do is shut it down, but a lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” he said on Tuesday. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
Trump met Schumer on Monday, but they failed to break the deadlock with the Democrat saying afterwards that “large differences” remain.
The president also said that if a deal was not struck “we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them”. The White House has suggested a shutdown could prompt permanent firings of federal staff deemed “non-essential”.
“We’ll be laying off a lot of people,” Trump said
