WASHINGTON—As the nation’s capital braces for a partial government shutdown that would impact the Department of Homeland Security, the White House is warning that it is all but certain to occur — and says the Democrats will be to blame.
“They’re going to shut the department down,” a senior White House official said on a call with reporters Thursday afternoon in reference to the Department of Homeland Security. “They’re going to deprive Americans of critical services such as FEMA, such as TSA, and what will be the third partial government shutdown of this Congress.
“Make no mistake,” the official added, “this is a Democrat-driven shutdown that is caused by their intransigence and desire to use government funding for services all Americans rely on as a hostage in order to achieve unrelated political goals. The administration remains interested in working with these guys in good faith, but we will not be held hostage on an issue that the president was elected on.”
On Thursday, Senate Democrats voted to block a motion to advance the House bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security and more than 260,000 federal staff. That motion failed by a 52-47 vote, thereby rejecting the White House’s offer to compromise.
The White House had sought a bipartisan agreement on the overall spending level in December, the senior White House official told reporters, and over the next few months, engaged in bipartisan negotiations over the remaining appropriations bills, culminating in a bipartisan deal on “all of the outstanding bills.”
(Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)
In early February, due to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats “repudiated that agreement,” the official said, which “jeopardized the entire funding package that had previously been negotiated on a bipartisan basis.”
“At the request of congressional Democrats, the administration acceded to a bipartisan compromise,” the official explained. “We would take five of the six bills that were still outstanding appropriations bills, and we would pass those as a full year, but the Department of Homeland Security’s funding bill, we would put on a temporary two-week extension.”
That two-week extension expires Friday at midnight, meaning that DHS will shut down tomorrow night.
Democrats sent the White House their lengthy position letter on February 4 and followed up on Saturday, February 7, with the legislative text. The White House reviewed that text over the weekend and put together a position paper in response that they sent back on Monday — working “in good faith” to produce some legislative specifications.
“Those legislative specs are substantive, they are detailed, they are serious, and they are binding on the administration,” the official said, noting that those specifications were transmitted on Wednesday evening.
Yet, at this point, the official said, “It seems clear that the Democrats are gonna walk away from that bipartisan conversation” and allow DHS to be shut down.
As for specific provisions that the White House and Democrats can’t agree on, the White House official cautioned that the White House won’t be negotiating in public. But one very challenging aspect is the judicial warrants, the official said.
“Ultimately, the red line here is: [We’re] certainly happy to take feedback and work in a bipartisan way to ensure, as we’ve seen with Tom Homan in Minneapolis, that we’re enforcing immigration law in the optimal way possible, but the administration is not going to accept concessions that meaningfully affect its ability to carry out its immigration enforcement agenda.”
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