The White House Seems Excited to Shut Down the Government

By Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker

23 April 17

ext Saturday, April 29th, is President Trump’s hundredth day in office, a historical marker used by the press to assess a new President’s progress since the first term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. F.D.R. was grappling with the Great Depression, and he had a pliant Congress that would have passed almost anything he proposed. Presidents since then have often struggled to meet the expectations of the hundred-day report card but generally can point to a list of major legislative accomplishments. Trump does not have such a list. At the same time, the Trump White House is facing a much more consequential deadline, one that will help define his first months in office and perhaps his first term: absent a spending deal with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, next Saturday the government will shut down.

While the potential for a government shutdown has been overshadowed by other events—Syria, North Korea, the attempted repeal of Obamacare—the Trump White House is suddenly seized with the issue. “Next week is going to have quite high drama,” a top White House official, who sounded excited by the coming clash, told me. “It’s going to be action-packed. This one is not getting as much attention, but, trust me, it’s going to be the battle of the titans. And the great irony here is that the call for the government shutdown will come on—guess what?—the hundredth day. If you pitched this in a studio, they would say, ‘Get out of here, it’s too ridiculous.’ This is going to be a big one.”

The last government shutdown was in October, 2013, and was widely blamed on conservative Republicans in the House, with a major assist from Senator Ted Cruz, who demanded that Obamacare had to be defunded, a ludicrous strategy given that Barack Obama was President. Congress failed to pass the necessary legislation, and the government closed for two weeks before Republicans came back to the table. At the time, many predicted that the tactic would have dire political consequences for the G.O.P., but the following year the Party expanded its majority in the House and took over the Senate. Republican leaders have prevented their right wing from forcing shutdowns in the years since, but one lesson from 2013 is that the threat of a government shutdown is a powerful way to press for concessions without paying too high a political price.

In recent weeks, the prospect of a government shutdown seemed low. In the House and Senate, Democratic and Republican appropriators, who, despite ideological differences, are often united in their desire to spend money, were making steady progress. But there was an elephant in the room. In mid-March, the Trump Administration released a detailed spending request that included a large increase for the military and for immigration enforcement and massive cuts to domestic discretionary spending. While the budget was released with fanfare, the White House seemed to retreat from the talks, leaving congressional Democrats and Republicans to continue their work without much guidance from Trump.

Yesterday, that changed. Mick Mulvaney, a Republican and former congressman who was one of the House members who agitated for the 2013 shutdown and is now Trump’s budget director, announced that “elections have consequences.” The consequence, it would seem, was a divisive proposal. Mulvaney suggested that if Trump didn’t get his defense spending and border wall—which, it should be noted, he promised would be paid for by Mexico—then the federal payments, known as cost-sharing reduction subsidies, or C.S.R., that pay for health insurance for millions of Americans under Obamacare had to be cut from the spending bill. The ruination of Obamacare is once again tied up with keeping the government running.

The funding legislation likely can’t pass in the House without some Democratic votes, and it certainly can’t pass without Democratic votes in the Senate, where Republicans need eight Democrats to reach the sixty-vote threshold to prevent a filibuster. The two sides aren’t even close.

“There’s a big spread between the bid and the ask here,” the White House official said, noting that Trump wanted thirty billion dollars for defense, several billion for more ICE agents and the border wall, as well as eighteen billion dollars in cuts to domestic spending and the ability to withhold federal money from cities that don’t coöperate with immigration officials.

The big priorities for Democrats are the money for those people who need Obamacare subsidies, the protection of domestic spending, and increases for programs for opioid addiction and health care for coal miners, the last two being issues that Trump ostensibly campaigned on. These shouldn’t be a big deal, Democrats say, and they have accused the White House of throwing a grenade into negotiations in order to wrest some sort of political victory in the first hundred days. “For weeks, the House and Senate Democrats and Republicans have been working well together,” a Democratic aide said. “Then, all of a sudden, the White House is looking at next week and they have nothing to show for the first one hundred days, and they either want a health-care bill to pass next week, which seems like a heavy lift, or to get more on immigration from this process. Even Republicans don’t want this fight, and they don’t want a shutdown on Day One Hundred of the Trump Administration.”

The White House, which is trying to force another vote on an Obamacare repeal, seems desperate to either win some of Trump’s priorities in a deal next week, or force a government shutdown that it can blame on Democrats. That might energize Trump’s supporters, who don’t have much to celebrate yet.

But it’s not just the Democrats who oppose several Trump priorities. Congressional Republicans, who are generally united in support for the increase in defense spending, are divided on the border wall, which is not popular among border-state Republicans, and the deep domestic-spending cuts.

So far, it does not look like a bridgeable gap. “This is going to be high-stakes poker,” the White House official said. When I asked if a shutdown was likely, the official paused for several seconds. “I don’t know,” the official said. The official added, “I just want my wall and my ICE agents.”