US Congress puts staff on notice as government nears shutdown
800,000 federal employees set to be suspended from midnight on Friday as budget talks hit new sticking point
Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said after talks with Barack Obama and John Boehner that he was less optimistic of a deal. Photograph: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images
The US Congress has begun sending out letters warning staff they will be suspended from this weekend along with hundreds of thousands of other workers as part of a looming federal government shutdown.
The letters inform staff whether they are regarded as essential – necessary to maintain security and keep Congress running – or non-essential. The process will be repeated at the White House, the Pentagon and hundreds of federal agencies that are preparing to scale back or cease operation from midnight on Friday.
The Democrats and Republicans failed on Thursday to end the stalemate in their budget dispute that will see the federal government shut down.
Barack Obama called the House speaker, John Boehner, a Republican, to the White House to see if their differences could be bridged.If no last-minute agreement is reached, the government will begin stopping everything from tourist visits to the Statue of Liberty and Alcatraz to wages for about 800,000 federal employees. In Washington, libraries will close, there will be no parking attendants and, for one week, no rubbish collection, and the University of the District of Columbia would also be shut.
One of the most emotional issues is that troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere would not receive pay cheques until the crisis is resolved. But they would at least continue earning during any shutdown, unlike civilian employees.
Hopes that a deal was closer rose after a White House meeting late on Wednesday between Barack Obama, Boehner, and the Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid.
But on Thursday morning, both Reid and Boehner went into reverse, with Reid saying he was more pessimistic than he had been the night before.
One of the Republican leaders in the House, Eric Cantor, signalled that a deal was unlikely before the Friday midnight deadline when he interrupted House proceedings to announce that Republican legislators were preparing to stay in session over the weekend to try to end the impasse.
The Republicans want a cut in the federal deficit of $40bn( £24bn). The Democrats made a compromise offer of $34.5bn on Wednesday. The new sticking points are mainly the areas where the Republicans want cuts – abortion programmes and environmental protection, on which the Democrats refuse to give way.
Reid, speaking in the Senate, said: "The numbers are basically there. But I'm not nearly as optimistic – and that's an understatement – as I was 11 hours ago. The numbers are extremely close. Our differences are no longer over how much savings we get on government spending."
He added: "The only thing holding up an agreement is an ideology." He said the Republican leadership had drawn a line in the sand over abortion and clean air, issues he said had no place in a budget bill.
But Boehner's office disputed that there was even agreement on the numbers.
The House, which is controlled by the Republicans, began passage of a bill that would keep the federal government going for at least another week. But the Senate, which is Democratic-controlled, will not pass it and Obama said he would veto it anyway.
The Democrats say they are not interested in another stop-gap measure and insist is only a Republican attempt to avoid blame for a shutdown. As evidence, they say that the bill includes $12bn in cuts.
But Boehner said: "The bill the House is considering today would fund our troops through September in the face of three conflicts and keep the government from shutting down tomorrow, while reflecting meaningful reductions in government spending that are widely accepted by both chambers of Congress."
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