The US Capitol Building in Washington DC, USA,
Dec 1, 2017. Photo courtesy of Agencies
A partial United States government shutdown went into effect at midnight Friday after lawmakers failed to reach a budget agreement over the president’s border wall funding demands.
Negotiations between the House and Senate reached a deadlock over President Donald Trump’s wishes for the budget to include a $5 billion allocation for his Mexico border-wall project.
Out of the nearly 800,000 federal workers who will now stop receiving their salaries, 420,000 “essential” personnel would still need to report to work. These employees are set to be back paid.
In a Twitter video on Friday night, Trump put the onus on the Democrats to settle the impasse.
“We’re going to have a shutdown. There’s nothing we can do about that because we need the Democrats to give us their votes,” Trump said.
Lawmakers are set to meet again on Saturday at noon.
This is the third partial shutdown of the Trump administration in 2018 after a three-day deadlock in January and another which lasted a few hours in February.
This time the president has said that he is ready to face a long shutdown in order to achieve his demands.
Trump may see this negotiation as his last opportunity to get funding for the wall, one of his major campaign promises, as the Democrats are set to gain control of the House of Representatives in January.
In his Twitter post, Trump also said that “we don’t want people coming in that aren’t supposed to be there,” and the video appeared to show migrants pushing on a wall while he continued to say “it’s very dangerous out there,” citing drugs, human trafficking and gangs.
He has been criticized in the past for fear mongering.
“We don’t want ‘em in the United States. We don’t want ‘em in our country. The only thing that’s going to stop that is great border security. With a wall! Or a slat fence, or whatever you wanna call it,” he said.
The longest administrative shutdown in US history lasted 21 days between Dec. 1995 and Jan, 1996 during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Barack Obama faced a 16-day shutdown in 2013.
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