The White House said Friday that Senate Democrats are “hell-bent” on shutting down the government at midnight despite President Trump’s best efforts to work out a spending deal, as a partial shutdown appeared imminent.
“This is not about policy, it’s about politics,” said White House legislative director Marc Short. “It seems that they are just hell-bent on getting to a shutdown.”
White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said Mr. Trump is “actively working right now to try to prevent a shutdown,” but Democrats are insisting on a fix to the DACA immigration program for young illegal immigrants.
“There’s no way you can lay this at the feet of the president,” Mr. Mulvaney said.
He said a partial shutdown “will look very different than it did” under the Obama administration in 2013, saying President Obama “weaponized the shutdown” four years ago by not shifting funds around to keep some services operating longer.
“The military will still go to work, they will not get paid,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “The border will still be patrolled; they will not get paid. The parks will be open; people won’t get paid. Things like the trash won’t get picked up. The post office will be open, the TSA will be open, but again all of these people will be working for nothing, which is simply not fair. We’re going to manage the shutdown differently.”
He said of the prior administration, “They chose to make it worse.” Four years ago, the Obama administration closed national parks and the Mall in Washington, preventing people from visiting monuments like the World War II Memorial.
Mr. Mulvaney said the chances of a partial government are “50-50.”
“We were operating under sort of a 30 percent shutdown [assumption on Thursday]. … I think we’re ratcheting it up now,” he told reporters.
He said White House officials had a teleconference with the heads of various government agencies earlier Friday morning to start implementing a “lapse plan” to prepare for a cutoff of funding.
“That’s what we call a shutdown, the formal name of it,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “We’re working to make sure there is no shutdown, but if the Senate or the House can’t get together to finalize a deal, we’ll be ready.”
He said the administration doesn’t want a shutdown, but he accused Democrats of engaging in the same sort of tactics as during the shutdown of 2013, when Republic Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas forced a shutdown over Obamacare. He said the current fight over the DACA immigration program isn’t related to spending.
“We’d like to keep the government open,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “They’re doing the exact same thing they accused the Republicans of doing in 2013. The better practice would be either to articulate what you don’t like about the bill, or vote for it and move forward. We can deal with DACA between now and March 5. There’s no reason DACA has to be dealt with this week.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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