US government to shut down within hours if no funding deal agreed
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that a high-stakes meeting between Donald Trump and top congressional Democrats on Monday resulted in no apparent breakthrough in negotiations to keep the government open, with JD Vance declaring afterwards: “I think we are headed into a shutdown.”
Democrats, who are refusing to support the GOP’s legislation to continue funding beyond Tuesday unless it includes several healthcare provisions, struck a more optimistic tone after the Oval Office encounter, which also included the Republican leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said he had outlined his concerns about the state of healthcare in the country to Trump, and said: “He seemed to, for the first time, understand the magnitude of this crisis.
“We hope he’ll talk to the Republican leaders and tell them: we need bipartisan input on healthcare, on decisions into their bill. Their bill does not have these – they never talked to us.”
But there was little sign that Republicans had shifted from their demands that Senate Democrats vote for their bill that would keep the government open until 21 November, so that long-term funding talks may continue. The GOP passed that bill through the House on a near party-line vote earlier this month, but it needs at least some Democratic support to advance in the Senate.
“This is purely and simply hostage-taking on behalf of the Democrats,” said the Senate majority leader John Thune. Referring to the Republican funding proposal, Thune said: “We could pick it up and pass it tonight, and pass it tomorrow before the government shuts down.”
Vance sought to pin the blame for any shutdown on the Democrats, saying: “I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing. I hope they change their mind, but we’re gonna see.”
Trump has not yet commented publicly on the meeting, which was not opened to reporters. In an interview earlier in the day with CBS News, the president said “I just don’t know how we are going to solve this issue,” and alleged the Democrats “are not interested in waste, fraud and abuse”.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
Donald Trump announced his proposed 20-point peace plan for Gaza, and held a public appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said he approved the plan. Neither leader took questions on the plan from journalists.
Hamas negotiators reportedly received a copy of the plan today, but have not yet responded.
The plan calls for a transitional government of Gaza that would involve international figures, including Trump and the former UK prime minister Tony Blair, whose inclusion sparked some immediate pushback, given his historic role in supporting the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the history of British colonization in the region.
The pending US government shutdown may be more severe for Americans than in the past, as the Trump administration is threatening to permanently fire federal employees during the shutdown, rather than simply furlough them temporarily.
Airlines and other aviation groups warned that the federal government shutdown could immediately affect airline passengers, as well as slow the pipeline of air-traffic-controllers currently in training to fill a huge gap in these crucial jobs.
YouTube, following the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter/X, is caving to a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump in response to the platforms deactivating his profiles after the 6 January insurrection in Washington. YouTube will pay $24.5m to settle the lawsuit: more than $20m of that is reportedly expected to fund the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom at the White House.
The Trump administration announced it was filing a lawsuit against Minnesota for the state’s immigration sanctuary policies, following similar lawsuits against Los Angeles and New York.
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Updated at 06.45 EDT
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Hegseth is speaking now.
“We’re clearing out the debris,” says Hegseth. “You might say, we’re ending the war on warriors.”
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Trump and Hegseth to address unprecedented gathering of military leaders
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is due to address the country’s top military leaders in Quantico, Virginia quite soon (it was billed as 8.15am ET). Donald Trump will also be attending, and it was revealed last night that he’ll also be speaking at 9am ET.
Last week, hundreds of generals and admirals were summoned at short notice and without explanation from around the world for this unusual meeting with Hegseth at at the Marine Corps Museum. They were initially not told why they were summoned in this unprecedented way, but it’s being reported that Hegseth is expected to talk about “warrior ethos”.
In an interview with NBC News, Trump said it would be “really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things”.
“We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps,’” he said. “You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”
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The US government is hurtling towards its first shutdown in six years, with no signs congressional leaders are near agreement on legislation to continue funding beyond the Tuesday night deadline to prevent workers from being furloughed and agencies from shutting their doors.
Congress’s Republican majority is pushing legislation to fund the government through 21 November, but Democrats have refused to vote for it unless it includes a series of concessions centered on healthcare.
Donald Trump convened a meeting of the two party’s congressional leaders on Monday evening, but there was no sign of a breakthrough, with JD Vance, the vice-president, declaring: “I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing.”
Republicans passed their funding bill through the House of Representatives on a near party-line vote, but it requires at least some Democratic support to advance in the Senate.
In exchange for their votes, the minority party is demanding an extension of subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, which expire at the end of the year. They also want to undo Republican cuts to Medicaid, the program providing healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and public media outlets.
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Dharna Noor
The White House will open 13.1m acres (5.3m hectares) of public land to coal mining while providing $625m for coal-fired power plants, the Trump administration has announced.
The efforts came as part of a suite of initiatives from the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, and Environmental Protection Agency, aimed at reviving the flagging coal sector. Coal, the most polluting and costly fossil fuel, has been on a rapid decline over the past 30 years, with the US halving its production between 2008 and 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
“This is an industry that matters to our country,” interior secretary Doug Burgum said in a livestreamed press conference on Monday morning, alongside representatives from the other two departments. “It matters to the world, and it’s going to continue to matter for a long time.”
Coal plants provided about 15% of US electricity in 2024 – a steep fall from 50% in 2000 – the EIA found, with the growth of gas and green power displacing its use. Last year, wind and solar produced more electricity than coal in the US for the first time in history, according to the International Energy Agency, which predicts that could happen at the global level by the end of 2026.
Despite its dwindling role, Trump has made the reviving the coal sector a priority of his second term amid increasing energy demand due to the proliferation of artificial intelligence data centers.
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Trump gutting protected status for immigrants will strain US healthcare, Democrats warn
The US healthcare system faces a “perfect storm”, more than 100 members of Congress warn today, as Donald Trump’s administration risks exacerbating pressure on its workforce by stripping nearly one million US immigrants of work authorization and legal protection.
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) has granted about 570,000 US workers protection from deportation, as their home countries are regarded as dangerous, due to factors like war and natural disaster.
Under Trump, the federal government has sought to cancel this status for people from eight countries – Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, and Venezuela – raising concerns about the impact on key sectors of the US workforce.
In a letter sent today to senior Trump officials, seen by the Guardian, an array of Democratic lawmakers led by the veteran senator Elizabeth Warren caution that the US healthcare system “cannot withstand yet another blow” after broader cuts since Trump return to office. “The most vulnerable Americans in need of healthcare will pay the price,” they warn.
Signatories of the letter – sent to Kristi Noem, US homeland security secretary; Robert F Kennedy Jr, health and human services secretary; and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, labor secretary – include Warren, senators Chris Van Hollen, Ed Markey, Cory Booker, Tammy Duckworth, andKirsten Gillibrand, as well as ongresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and Jasmine Crockett.
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, who caucuses with the Democrats, also signed the letter.
Immigrants make up between 32 to 40% of workers in US home care settings, they note in the letter, 24% in residential care, and 21% in nursing facilities. Some 15% of non-citizen healthcare workers originate from nations under temporary protected status.
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Dani Anguiano
Portland is bracing for the deployment of 200 national guard troops as Donald Trump moves ahead with plans to bring the US military into another Democratic-run city.
Oregon filed a lawsuit to block the deployment, which the state has warned will escalate tensions and lead to unrest when there is “no need or legal justification” to bring federal troops into Portland.
Trump on Saturday claimed Portland is “war ravaged” and that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities there are under attack, but there is no evidence of that and protests outside Ice sites have been small.
It is the latest development in Trump’s years-long fixation on the Pacific north-west city of 635,000 that extended through the president’s first term in the White House. The president has frequently sought to paint the city as out of control and, as he described in September, like “living in hell”.
During the first Trump administration, Portland was the site of major rightwing gatherings, counterprotests and clashes between both groups, and in 2020 it became a hotspot for the racial justice protests that swept the US in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.
In response to the large racial justice protests, the president sent federal agents, including an elite border patrol unit, which teargassed crowds and arrested protesters off the streets into unmarked vehicles.
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Donald Trump to preside over gathering of US military’s top commanders in Quantico, Virginia
President Donald Trump will preside on Tuesday over an extraordinary gathering of America’s top generals and admirals from around the world, who were summoned to a Marine base in Virginia without explanation last week.
Trump has said he will use the face-to-face meeting with the US military’s top commanders at the Marine Corps University in Quantico to tell them “we love them.”
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to talk about the “warrior ethos”, Reuters reported.
The meeting comes after eight months of blistering changes at the Pentagon since Trump took office, including firing the chair of the joint chiefs of staff and the navy’s top admiral, banning books from academy libraries and lethal strikes on suspected drug boats off Venezuela.
That has led to speculation, within the US military and in the broader American public, that the gathering could go far beyond the morale-boosting exercise described by Trump to include discussions about reductions in senior officers’ ranks and a revamp of US defense priorities.
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Updated at 07.16 EDT
Ramon Antonio Vargas
The Utah governor, Spencer Cox, has called on people in the US to “stop shooting each other – that’s it” saying he makes that plea against political violence after being unable to “unsee” video of a sniper in his state killing rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.
Cox delivered those comments in an interview aired Sunday evening on the CBS program 60 Minutes, 18 days after Kirk’s shooting death at Utah Valley University (UVU) and one week from the Turning Point USA founder’s memorial service outside Phoenix.
The Republican politician told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that his fellow conservative accuse him “all the time” of wanting people to have a “kumbaya” moment – “to hold hands and just hug it out”.
“I’m not asking anybody to hold hands and hug it out – I’m not asking for that,” Cox said on the premiere of 60 Minutes’ 58th season. “I’m trying to get people to stop shooting each other – that’s it.”
Cox alluded to public discourse that sought to frame Kirk’s killing as having occurred during a war – not formally declared – being waged between Americans on opposite sides of the country’s political divide. He contended that those trying to agitate tempers amid that rhetorical climate – including and particularly on social media platforms – were “making mistakes”.
“The question I always ask when I hear people say … that we’re at war … (is) what does that mean?” Cox also remarked. “What is next? Who am I supposed to shoot now?”
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US justice department sues Minnesota over sanctuary city policies
Cecilia Nowell
The justice department has sued the state of Minnesota over its sanctuary city immigration policies, making it the latest locality to face legal threats as the Trump administration attempts to carry out the president’s campaign promise of mass deportations.
“Minnesota officials are jeopardizing the safety of their own citizens by allowing illegal aliens to circumvent the legal process,” Pamela Bondi, the attorney general, said in a statement.
The justice department added that Minnesota’s policies of refusing to cooperate with immigration authorities are illegal under federal law and have resulted in the release of so-called “dangerous criminals”. Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention.
The Minnesota cities of Minneapolis, St Paul and Hennepin county join the ranks of Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and the states of New Jersey and Colorado: Democratic led jurisdictions which are facing similar lawsuits over their sanctuary city policies.
A Trump administration court filing in June – amid demonstrations against immigration raids – called Los Angeles’s sanctuary city ordinance “illegal” and asked that it be blocked from being enforced to allow the White House to crack down on what it calls a “crisis of illegal immigration”.
Over the summer, the justice department sent letters to 13 states it classified as “sanctuary jurisdictions”, including California and Rhode Island, and 22 local governments, from Boston to Seattle, informing their leaders that they could face prosecution or lose federal funding for “undermining” and “obstructing” federal immigration agents.
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Pentagon review reportedly confirms Aukus submarines pact is safe
Dan Jervis-Bardy
The Aukus submarine deal will proceed as planned after reportedly surviving the Pentagon’s review of the security pact.
The Japan-based Nikkei Asia reported the Trump administration would retain the original timeline for the $368bn program, which includes the US selling three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia from 2032.
A US Department of Defense official would not confirm the report when contacted by Guardian Australia.
“The Aukus initiative is still under review. We have no further Aukus updates to announce at this time,” the official said.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, acknowledged the review was still under way but was confident Aukus had the support of the US and the UK – the third partner in the pact.
“We know that Aukus is in the interests of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States,” Albanese said from Abu Dhabi, the last stop in an overseas trip that has included visits to the two Aukus allies.
“It is about a partnership which is in the interest of all three nations which will make peace and security in our region so much stronger.”
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US deports planeload of Iranians after deal with Tehran, New York Times says
The Trump administration is deporting a planeload of about 100 Iranians back to Iran from the United States, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing two senior Iranian officials involved in the negotiations and a US official with knowledge of the plans.
Iranian officials said that a US-chartered flight, took off from Louisiana on Monday night and was scheduled to arrive in Iran by way of Qatar sometime on Tuesday, the report added.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
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US government to shut down within hours if no funding deal agreed
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that a high-stakes meeting between Donald Trump and top congressional Democrats on Monday resulted in no apparent breakthrough in negotiations to keep the government open, with JD Vance declaring afterwards: “I think we are headed into a shutdown.”
Democrats, who are refusing to support the GOP’s legislation to continue funding beyond Tuesday unless it includes several healthcare provisions, struck a more optimistic tone after the Oval Office encounter, which also included the Republican leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said he had outlined his concerns about the state of healthcare in the country to Trump, and said: “He seemed to, for the first time, understand the magnitude of this crisis.
“We hope he’ll talk to the Republican leaders and tell them: we need bipartisan input on healthcare, on decisions into their bill. Their bill does not have these – they never talked to us.”
But there was little sign that Republicans had shifted from their demands that Senate Democrats vote for their bill that would keep the government open until 21 November, so that long-term funding talks may continue. The GOP passed that bill through the House on a near party-line vote earlier this month, but it needs at least some Democratic support to advance in the Senate.
“This is purely and simply hostage-taking on behalf of the Democrats,” said the Senate majority leader John Thune. Referring to the Republican funding proposal, Thune said: “We could pick it up and pass it tonight, and pass it tomorrow before the government shuts down.”
Vance sought to pin the blame for any shutdown on the Democrats, saying: “I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing. I hope they change their mind, but we’re gonna see.”
Trump has not yet commented publicly on the meeting, which was not opened to reporters. In an interview earlier in the day with CBS News, the president said “I just don’t know how we are going to solve this issue,” and alleged the Democrats “are not interested in waste, fraud and abuse”.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
Donald Trump announced his proposed 20-point peace plan for Gaza, and held a public appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said he approved the plan. Neither leader took questions on the plan from journalists.
Hamas negotiators reportedly received a copy of the plan today, but have not yet responded.
The plan calls for a transitional government of Gaza that would involve international figures, including Trump and the former UK prime minister Tony Blair, whose inclusion sparked some immediate pushback, given his historic role in supporting the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the history of British colonization in the region.
The pending US government shutdown may be more severe for Americans than in the past, as the Trump administration is threatening to permanently fire federal employees during the shutdown, rather than simply furlough them temporarily.
Airlines and other aviation groups warned that the federal government shutdown could immediately affect airline passengers, as well as slow the pipeline of air-traffic-controllers currently in training to fill a huge gap in these crucial jobs.
YouTube, following the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter/X, is caving to a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump in response to the platforms deactivating his profiles after the 6 January insurrection in Washington. YouTube will pay $24.5m to settle the lawsuit: more than $20m of that is reportedly expected to fund the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom at the White House.
The Trump administration announced it was filing a lawsuit against Minnesota for the state’s immigration sanctuary policies, following similar lawsuits against Los Angeles and New York.
Share
Updated at 06.45 EDT
