The president’s top economist said he believes the shutdown will end this week.
President Donald Trump on Oct. 20 said he was optimistic that lawmakers from the Democratic Party would soon vote on a measure to reopen the government, three weeks after the shutdown began.
“We’re hoping … that we will get the vote pretty soon. And I hear they’re starting to feel that way, too,” Trump said at the White House. “They’re starting to feel like they really have to do what’s right for the country, and they will.”
The shutdown was initiated on Oct. 1 after members of Congress could not agree in time to pass a stopgap measure.
Democrats, a minority in Congress, said that any measure ending the shutdown needs to contain protections on health care, including an extension of health insurance subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year, while Republicans have said that the two issues should be considered separately.
Since the shutdown started, the Senate has voted 11 times to reopen the government, with all of them failing. In the Senate, 60 votes are needed to pass the stopgap measure. Republicans have 53 seats.
Trump’s top economist, Kevin Hassett, told CNBC on Monday that he believes the shutdown will end sometime this week.
“There’s a shot that this week, things will come together, and very quickly,” Hassett said. “The moderate Democrats will move forward and get us an open government, at which point we could negotiate whatever policies they want to negotiate with regular order.”
Hassett also said on Monday that Trump “has been very active throughout this process, but it’s also his position that this is a thing that the Senate needs to work out.”
He warned that if that doesn’t happen, the Trump administration could impose “stronger measures” in negotiations and force Democrats to cooperate. That could include the White House’s budget director, Russell Vought, taking action, he said, without elaborating.
Trump and other administration officials have said that layoffs were on the table during the shutdown, while Vought, earlier this month, initiated layoffs. A federal judge in San Francisco last week paused those layoffs in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of federal workers’ unions.
