Jeanne Shaheen

Nov. 7 (UPI) — Democrats are ready to end the federal government shutdown if Republicans agree to extend Affordable Care Act credits for another year, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Friday afternoon.

Schumer, D-N.Y., said Senate Democrats favor passing a temporary funding measure and three other bills that would fund the federal government for one year, CNN reported.

“Democrats are offering a very simple compromise,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

“Now, the ball is in the Republicans’ court,” he added. “We need Republicans to just say yes.”

Schumer’s announcement came after Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., earlier said the Senate will work through the weekend to negotiate reopening the federal government and possibly vote after a bipartisan effort failed Thursday.

Thune wanted to hold another vote on the House-approved continuing resolution to fund the federal government through Nov. 21, but Senate Democrats aren’t on board, he told media earlier Friday.

“Our members are going to be advised to be available if, in fact, there’s a need to vote,” he said.

“We will see what happens and whether or not, over the course of the next couple of days, the Democrats can find their way to re-engage again,” Thune added.

Thune earlier this week expressed optimism that a funding agreement would be made this week, but that ended after Senate Democrats met on Thursday.

“All I know is that the pep rally they had at lunch yesterday evidently changed some minds,” he said Friday.

“We had given them everything they wanted and had asked for,” Thune explained. “At some point, I was gonna say they have to take ‘yes’ for an answer, and they were trending in that direction.”

The impasse is due to Senate Democrats not trusting President Donald Trump to agree to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits that expire after December and to stop firing federal employees, The Hill reported.

Senate Democrats held a working lunch on Thursday, as referenced by Thune, during which they rejected a bipartisan proposal to reopen the government.

Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Angus King, I-Maine, had worked out a deal with the GOP, which buoyed Thune’s hope of ending the government shutdown on its record 38th day.

Senate Democrats discussed the bipartisan proposal during their Thursday lunch and rejected it due to their distrust of the president.

The proposal would have included a short-term funding measure to reopen the government and a three-year appropriations bill that would have funded the Agriculture Department, Veterans Affairs, military construction and the legislative branch.

The USDA funding would have meant full funding for currently suspended Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

Lacking strong guarantees that the president would support extending Affordable Care Act credits that initially were enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic and that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, the Senate Democrats said they won’t support the bipartisan plan to move forward.

Despite the continued opposition from Senate Democrats, Thune doesn’t expect the shutdown to continue into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend at the end of the month, he said while appearing on Fox News Friday.

Thune needs at least five more Senate Democrats to join with Democratic Party Sens. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and King, who caucuses with Senate Democrats, to approve the continuing resolution.

Fetterman, Masto and King consistently have voted in favor of continuing the 2025 fiscal year budget while negotiating the budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which started on Oct. 1.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is the only Republican senator to continually vote against the measure.

The House-approved continuing resolution consistently has received a majority of support in the Senate, but it has not received the 60 votes needed to overcome the Senate’s filibuster rule for passage.

Oct. 16 (UPI) — The Senate failed for the 10th time to approve a temporary funding bill to reopen the federal government and voted down a Defense Department appropriations bill on Thursday.

The Senate voted 51-45 in favor of a funding resolution to reopen the federal government, but the vote total was less than the 60 needed for approval.

Two Senate Democrats, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, voted in favor of the temporary government funding measure, according to CNN.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the lone GOP member to vote against the measure.

The Senate later in the day voted 50-44 on a year-long appropriations bill to fund the Defense Department as the government enters the 16th day of its shutdown over a stopgap funding bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., opposed considering the Defense Department spending bill without also considering the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill, The Hill reported.

Like the government funding measure, the defense budget needs 60 votes to pass. It also would have given a raise for military personnel.

Senate Democrats have voted consistently with no change during the 10 votes to reopen the federal government, as have GOP senators, including Paul in his funding opposition.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., responded to the legislative stalemate by offering to hold floor debates on respective spending bills to fund federal agencies for the 2026 fiscal year, Politico reported.

Thune also suggested Senate Democrats, who have proposed an alternative temporary funding measure, might have some caucus members vote for the House-approved funding resolution due to the effects of an extended government shutdown.

The House already approved the measure favored by the GOP, which simply extends the 2025 funding through Nov. 21 while continuing negotiations on a full-year funding bill.

Senate Democrats have proposed an alternative measure that would fund the federal government through Oct. 31 and extend Affordable Care Act tax credits on insurance premiums and expand Medicaid access.

Schumer blamed the GOP for the budget impasse by refusing to negotiate a proposed $1.5 trillion in additional spending over the next decade that Senate Democrats want to include in the stopgap funding.

“The Trump shutdown drags on because Republicans refuse to work with or even negotiate with Democrats in a serious way to fix the healthcare crisis in America,” Schumer said, as reported by Politico.

Thune in an interview that aired on MSNBC on Thursday morning said Senate Republicans will not negotiate the ACA tax credits until the government is open again, according to ABC News.

The fiscal year started on Oct. 1, which is the first day of the government shutdown due to a lack of funding.

Thune said his party plans to attach additional funding bills to the Pentagon measure, though it’s unclear if Democrats support the idea, CBS News reported.

The additional bills would seek to fund the Departments of Health and Human Services and Labor.

In an analysis published in September, the Urban Institute said the number of uninsured people between the ages of 19 and 34 would increase by 25% if the subsidies expire in the new year.

There would be a 14% increase among children. In all, 4.8 million people would lose health insurance coverage.

The Trump administration has said it’s against extending the ACA subsidies, and has accused Democrats at the state level of using federal tax dollars to provide undocumented immigrants with healthcare services, which Democrats have denied.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for health insurance under the ACA, the federal healthcare.gov website states.

In an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday night, Thune said he told Democratic leaders he’d be willing to hold a vote on the subsidies in exchange for their help reopening the government.

“We can guarantee you a vote by a date certain,” he said. “At some point, Democrats have to take ‘yes’ for an answer.

“I can’t guarantee it’s going to pass. I can guarantee you that there will be a process and you will get a vote.”

July 12 (UPI) — The State Department on Friday began notifying 1,353 affected workers of their pending job losses as the department reduces its workforce by 15%.

The people losing their jobs amid the downsizing work in positions that are being eliminated or consolidated, a State Department official told media on Thursday, NBC News reported.

“This is the most complicated personnel reorganization that the federal government has ever undertaken,” the official told reporters during a briefing. “It was done so in order to be very focused on looking at the functions that we want to eliminate or consolidate, rather than looking at individuals.”

The State Department notified 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service workers of their pending job losses, CBS News reported.

The department plans to eliminate nearly 3,400 positions, including many who have already accepted voluntary departure offers this year.

The State Department also will close or consolidate many U.S.-based offices as part of the reduction in force that is being done in accordance with a reorganization plan, which members of Congress received in March.

The Trump administration says the downsizing is needed to eliminate redundancy and better enable the State Department to focus on its primary responsibilities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio created the downsizing plan, which he said is needed due to the department being too costly, ideologically driven and cumbersome, The New York Times reported.

The downsizing isn’t going unchallenged on Capitol Hill.

All Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Friday opposed the downsizing in a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“During a time of increasingly complex and widespread challenges to U.S. national security, this administration should be strengthening our diplomatic corps — an irreplaceable instrument of U.S. power and leadership — not weakening it,” the Democratic Party senators said.

“However, [downsizing] would severely undermine the department’s ability to achieve U.S. foreign policy interests, putting our nation’s security, strength and prosperity at risk.”

The Senate Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee include Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Chris Coons of Delaware, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Tim Kaine of Virginia.

The Senate committee’s other Democratic Party members are Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Jacky Rosen of Nevada.

May 29 (UPI) — The Trump administration announced plans Thursday to overhaul the Department of State, saying the federal agency has grown too big and costly while producing too few results.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that he has submitted the reorganization plan to Congress — a report that includes feedback from lawmakers, government bureaus and employees.

He first announced plans for the reorganization in April, calling his department “bloated, bureaucratic and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition.”

The report submitted to Congress, obtained by Politico, would reduce the State Department’s domestic workforce by 3,448 jobs, including recent reductions in positions and voluntary exits under the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program.

It also calls for the elimination of most offices under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which champions American values abroad, including the rule of law and individual rights.

Positions to be created under the plan align with the Trump administration’s conservative reshaping of the federal government, including a deputy assistant secretary of state for Democracy and Western values, as well as a so-called Natural Rights Office that will “ground the department’s values-based diplomacy in traditional Western conceptions of core freedoms,” according to an international state Department notification to lawmakers states cited by Politico.

“Over the past quarter century, the domestic operations of the State Department have grown exponentially, resulting in more bureaucracy, higher costs and fewer results for the American people,” Rubio said Wednesday.

“The reorganization plan will result in a more agile Department, better equipped to promote America’s interests and keep Americans safe across the world.”

It was unclear how Congress would react to the proposal, but House and Senate Democrats on the foreign relations committees quickly rejected the plan as being detrimental to U.S. interests abroad.

They said it “hands over” Afghan allies who worked with the U.S. military to the Taliban, guts programs to protect people who protect democracy, fires thousands of employees without cause and moves foreign assistance programs to entities with no experience with managing them.

“We welcome reforms where needed but they must be done with a scalpel, not a chainsaw,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., ranking member of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., ranking member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

“Taken together, these moves significantly undercut America’s role in the world and open the door for adversaries to threaten our safety and prosperity,” she said.

The overhaul comes as the Trump administration seeks to reshape and downsize the federal government in an effort to consolidate more power under President Donald Trump.