By Richard Cowan and David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -With less than two weeks to go before a March 14 deadline, Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress appear to be nowhere close to a deal to avert a government shutdown that would throw Washington into deeper turmoil.
The talks have been complicated by President Donald Trump, who has ignored spending laws passed by Congress, suspended foreign aid and fired tens of thousands of federal workers.
Both sides say his actions are the biggest sticking point as they seek to reach a deal that would provide government funding beyond March 14, when it is due to expire.
Democrats say they are trying to secure guarantees that would prevent Trump and his budget-slashing point person, billionaire Elon Musk, from firing more workers or cancelling more government programs.
“We will continue to make clear that the law has to be followed,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters late last week.
Republicans say Democrats are trying to undo Trump’s actions, which they call a nonstarter.
“The bigger issue is the Democrats’ insistence on putting poison pills into the bill that would restrict the president’s abilities,” Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine told reporters last week.
Collins said she is “very close” to an agreement with Democrats that would fund the government at current levels through September 30, the end of the fiscal year. Trump has said on social media that he supports that approach.
Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington said that would give Trump more power to shift funding as he pleases and would create shortfalls for some safety net programs. Both she and Collins have said a flat-line extension would also pose problems for the U.S. military at a time when the United States is confronting challenges from Russia, China and other parts of the world.
The spending deal only covers a portion of the budget, funding agencies like the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency. It would not address the country’s rising borrowing costs or rapidly growing benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Republicans are separately pushing to extend the tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017. One version, which narrowly passed the House last week, would cut taxes by $4.5 trillion and reduce spending by $2 trillion over a decade. Independent analysts say that would further add to the nation’s $36 trillion debt load.
House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said in a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was aiming to pass a stopgap funding bill.
“We are working hard to do our responsibility to keep the government open,” said Johnson, of Louisiana. “We need our Democrat colleagues to come to the table and be reasonable about that.”
Johnson leads a slim 218-215 majority and last year had to repeatedly turn to Democrats to pass legislation through his chamber, where a simple majority suffices. Democratic votes are needed to pass most bills in the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority, short of the 60-vote threshold for most legislation.
Trump’s administration has made clear that its budget cutting efforts will continue. Officials last week ordered federal agencies to lay the groundwork for further layoffs, beyond the 100,000 who have already been fired or offered a buyout. The government employed 2.3 million civilian workers last year.
Failure to reach a spending deal by March 14 would force the government to furlough hundreds of thousands of workers and shutter “nonessential” operations, such as financial regulation and trash pickup at national parks.
The last government shutdown was also the longest, ending in January 2019 after 35 days, as Trump during his first term in office and lawmakers clashed over his effort to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
With no clear resolution in sight, lawmakers have already begun pointing fingers.
“Republicans have a responsibility to fund the government,” Jeffries said last week, pointing out that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
Representative John Rutherford, a Florida Republican, said if Democrats vote against the “clean” extension of spending through September, “they’re the ones voting for the shutdown, not us.”
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and David Morgan, additional reporting by Katharine Jackson; editing by Andy Sullivan and Chizu Nomiyama)
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