The White House says layoffs to start “imminently”

The mass layoffs of American federal workers will begin within two days, said the White House, while legislators are exchanging the government’s first closure in almost seven years.

The closure began on Wednesday after the Republicans and Democrats in Congress did not agree with a new spending plan before the midnight deadline.

There is little sign that each side is ready to compromise, and a vote to end the closure failed a few hours after its start.

The Senate has since adjourned, which raises fears that the closure will lead and threatens hundreds of thousands of jobs as well as risks that cost billions of American savings in production.

During a white house briefing on Wednesday afternoon, vice-president JD Vance made a rare appearance alongside the press secretary Karoline Leavitt and accused Democrats of playing political games.

“If they are so worried about the effect it has on the American people, and they should be, what they should do is reopen the government, not complain about the way we react,” he said.

Leavitt, on the other hand, said that mass job cuts would occur within two days. “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do,” she said, adding that “Democrats have put us in this position”.

It was the last excavation of what was a game of bitter blame between the two parties, with the best democrat of the Senate Chuck Schumer, accusing the Republicans earlier to have tried to “intimidate” the Democrats to accept their financing plan.

Democrats want to obtain guarantees on the financing of health care before they accept a spending agreement, while the Republicans wish to use a temporary measure of efforts to keep the government open until mid-November and financed at current levels.

Democrats said they had enabled the government to close in an attempt to negotiate to save health benefits for low -income Americans. They have said that efforts to negotiate with the Republicans on these advantages have so far failed.

“Why do they boycott the negotiations? I have never witnessed this in my life,” said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat in Connecticut, about the Republicans. “The case is that the government will open when the Republicans are serious to speak to the Democrats.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans – who control the two chambers of the congress but do not have the 60 votes necessary to adopt a financing bill – said that these health services were not priority, keeping the government open is.

“It is not a question of knowing who wins or who loses or who is blamed and all this,” said the head of the majority of the Senate, John Thune. “It is the American people. And (the Democrats) took the American people hostage in a way which, according to them, benefits them politically.”

The Republicans also argued that the health extensions that Democrats are looking for will cost the American taxpayers more money and have been instituted to manage the complexities of the era of the cocoan which no longer exist.

Essential workers such as border agents and soldiers may be forced to work without salary at the moment – but government employees deemed not essential are temporarily placed on unpaid leave. In the past, these workers were then paid retrospectively.

Analysts expect this closure to be greater than the last in 2018, when the Congress adopted financing bills. They expect approximately 40% of federal workers – around 750,000 people – to be put on temporary leave.

Some workers were on leave on Wednesday. But the Trump administration has also threatened the permanent layoff of federal workers.

“Let’s be honest, if this thing is moving away,” said Vance during the briefing on Wednesday, “we’re going to have to deposit people.”

Vance has also made the complaint – refused on several occasions by the Democrats – that closure is the result of senior democrats who argue for health care services to be extended to undocumented migrants.

US law already prohibits undocumented migrants from obtaining health coverage subsidized by the federal government. “Nowhere have the Democrats suggested that we are interested in modifying the federal law,” said Hakeem Jeffries, the chief of the room.

Russell Vought, the head of the White House budget, informed the Républicains on camera about what imminent layoffs could look like, although the public details of these plans are rare.

In Capitol Hill, there was little appetite for an agreement to end the case on Wednesday.

“There is nothing to negotiate. There is nothing that we can withdraw from this bill to make it leaner or cleaner than it is,” said Mike Johnson, republican president.

Another vote on the short -term financing bill proposed by the Republicans is expected on Friday.

With additional reports from Bernd Debusmann Jr in the White House