The United States government has partially shut down after last-ditch efforts by lawmakers to pass a spending bill failed.
Funding to keep the federal government running expired at 00:01 EDT (04:01 GMT) on Wednesday after Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate rejected rival stopgap proposals.
While the US government has partially ceased operations more than a dozen times since 1980, President Donald Trump’s threats to use the funding lapse to dramatically reduce the size of the public sector have raised the prospect of greater disruption than in past shutdowns.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump warned that he could use the shutdown to take actions that are “bad” for Democrats.
“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 programmes that they like,” Trump said, adding that “a lot of good” can come from government shutdowns.
The shutdown, the first such funding lapse since 2018, means that some government services deemed to be non-essential will come to a halt, including the publication of key economic data and loan approvals for small businesses.
Essential workers, such as law enforcement officers, military personnel and air traffic controllers, will remain on the job, but will go without pay for the duration of the shutdown.
Social security and food assistance will continue to be paid out.
While hundreds of thousands of federal employees were placed on temporary leave and received back pay upon returning to work during previous shutdowns, Trump has threatened to use the current funding lapse to fire a “lot of people”.
“And they’re Democrats; they’re going to be Democrats,” Trump said.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W Bush, called the threats “typical of President Trump’s strong-arm tactics”.
“He is threatening federal workers with termination if there is a shutdown,” Painter told Al Jazeera.
“Some of what he is threatening, he may be able to do, but much of it is not authorised by Congress, including firing federal workers with civil service job protection.”
Wednesday’s shutdown comes after weeks of bickering between Democrats and Republicans over how to keep the government open.
Democrats earlier this month rejected a Republican-drafted stopgap spending bill to keep the government running for nine more weeks, arguing that the measure should include provisions to expand healthcare coverage, including by extending soon-to-expire subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and reversing Medicaid cuts included in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Republicans have argued that issues like healthcare should be addressed separately in bipartisan negotiations further down the track.
In an 11th-hour bid to avert a shutdown on Tuesday, Senate Republicans failed to pass a stopgap bill that would have extended funding until November 21 in a 55-to-45 vote.
Two Democrats, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, as well as Angus King, an independent from Maine, voted with Republicans to advance the bill, which needed 60 votes to pass.
Republicans, in turn, knocked back a Democratic bill that would have extended funding until the end of October and increased spending on healthcare by more than $1 trillion.
That vote failed 47-53, with no Republicans in support.
“I think that it is impossible to predict what Trump is going to do,” Gerald Epstein, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, told Al Jazeera.
“Will the Dems cave? Probably not for a while.”
After the failed votes, Republicans and Democrats traded blame for the impasse.
“Republicans are plunging us into a government shutdown rather than fixing their healthcare crisis,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, accused Republicans of voting to “hurt everyday Americans”.
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune expressed hope that enough Democrats would cross the aisle to pass his party’s “clean” bill in a follow-up vote on Wednesday.
“This was all unnecessary. This was all done to satisfy their left political base,” Thune said in an interview with Fox News.
Including the current funding lapse, the US government has shut down 15 times since 1980, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The longest shutdown in US history, lasting 34 days, took place in late 2018 and early 2019, during Trump’s first term as president.
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