WASHINGTON (TNND) — The government shutdown is dragging through another week with little signs of progress in breaking the impasse between Democrats and Republicans to reopen agencies and restore full services as the two parties dig in deeper to their positions.
Both sides have shown no indication of budging on their current positions, putting the U.S. in a pool of uncertainty about when progress could be made to reopen the government.
The White House has tried to pressure Democrats to give up their withholding of votes in the Senate by cutting more federal workers and what the president described as a list of “Democratic programs” that will be slashed if the government remains closed. President Donald Trump has already laid of thousands of federal workers and canceled billions in federal aid to persuade Democrats to come to the table.
Meanwhile, Democrats have not yielded from their demands for Republicans to include renewing health care subsidies in the government funding bills and have rejected promises to negotiate them later once the government is reopened. Democratic appropriators have also taken issues with the president’s attempts to redirect or block congressionally appropriated funds, adding an element of distrust to what is already a complicated process of funding the federal government.
Leadership in both parties have pointed fingers across the aisle on who is to blame for the government being shut down in a prolonged impasse entering its third week. At the onset of the shutdown, voters were more likely to blame Trump and Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
But that view may be shifting, with some polling on who voters blame is starting to shift toward Democrats, though Republicans and Trump are still the main culprit for who voters blame most for the shutdown.
A YouGov-The Economist poll released this week found only 6 percentage points separate the parties on who takes the most blamed, with 39% of Americans saying Trump and Republicans, while 33% blame the Democrats. Last week, the same poll found an 11-point difference, suggesting a potential shift in the outlook among Americans.
Twenty percent of people in the poll said they blamed both parties for the shutdown, compared to 23% last week.
While the shutdown is dragging into its third week, the effects of it are only at the beginning stages of becoming visible to much of the public. Airport delays are starting to pile up as the shutdown worsens the air traffic controller shortage, aid programs are running out of funding and service members could miss paychecks.
The battle of public opinion could see further shifts as the effects of the shutdown become more apparent.
“Until we start seeing a majority go for one party the other, I’m not sure there’s enough incentive for the two sides to get together,” said David McLennan, a political science professor and director of the Meredith poll. “Both sides have been talked into fighting. Democrats have heard this message since this second inauguration of Trump that they haven’t fought hard enough, and this is their way of fighting, and Republicans feel like they’re owning the Dems by keeping the government shut down.”
The Pentagon reorganized funds to ensure active-duty troops would be paid this week despite the shutdown, but service members could miss their next check on Oct. 31 if the government is reopened by then. Paying troops has historically served as motivation for lawmakers to come to the bargaining table to work out a deal, a pressure point that did not work this time around.
House Speaker Mike Johnson accused the Democrats of using members of the military as hostages for their health care demands.
“Republicans want to pay the troops, and we have shown that with our actions and our votes now nine times, and the Democrats want to use them as hostages to extort $1.5 trillion in new unserious partisan spending. That, we just won’t go along with,” Johnson said.
Johnson already predicted this could be the longest shutdown in U.S. history, surpassing the record of 35 days set during the first Trump administration, which would stretch it into Thanksgiving holiday travel. With delays and cancellations already piling up, it could add more pressure onto lawmakers to find a deal.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pushed Johnson to reopen the House for weeks and blamed Republicans for not being in the Capitol working to find a deal with Democrats.
“It’s time to reopen the government, it’s time to enact a bipartisan spending agreement that actually makes life better for everyday Americans. It’s time to address the Republican health care crisis. Democrats are in this fight until we win this fight for the American people,” Jeffries said on Wednesday.
In addition to claiming more progress on hearing from voters about expiring health insurance subsidies, Democrats are also being motivated to continue their resistance to Trump and Republicans through pressure from their voters. Polls have consistently captured frustrations among the party’s base that its elected leaders are not doing enough to stand up to Trump, though they have little power to stand in the way of Republican policies other than forcing a shutdown to leverage policy concessions.
“For Republicans, the economic impact of the shutdown is probably going to be the lever that gets them to the table. For Democrats, I don’t know what that issue is going to be because that talk about fighting is sort of the dominant theme within the Democratic Party right now,” McLennan said.
