Senate fails to pass stopgap funding bill as government heads for midnight shutdown – follow live

In a statement expanding on her decision to vote for the GOP short-term funding bill, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto said: “We need a bipartisan solution to address the impending healthcare crisis, but we should not be swapping the pain of one group of Americans for another.”

Notably, Cortez Masto voted joined several Senate Democrats in March to pass a continuing resolution, and avert a government shutdown, much to the ire of several progressive lawmakers.

Another Democratic senator to vote “yes” on the Republican short-term funding bill is Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.

Meanwhile, Independent senator Angus King, of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, also voted for the resolution.

Democratic senator John Fetterman broke ranks with his party and just voted for the Republican-written funding extension.

This is in line with his vote earlier in the month.

on Capitol Hill

Republican senator Ted Cruz described Democrats’s shutdown threat as a “temper tantrum” that would ultimately go nowhere.

“They’re trying to show… that they hate Trump,” he told reporters. “It will end inevitably in capitulation. At some point they’re going to turn the lights on again, but first they have to rage into the night.”

The Texas senator knows of which he speaks. He played a major role in leading a 2013 shutdown aimed at defunding the Affordable Care Act, which - as government shutdowns tend to - did not succeed.

Senate majority leader, John Thune, has introduced votes on the GOP-written continuing resolution, which would keep the government funded until 21 November.

“All indications are the Democrats are going to reject the clean, nonpartisan funding extension here before us and choose to shut the government down,” the Republican senator said. “Democrat leaders may be determined to take government funding hostage for their own partisan purposes. You don’t have to join them.”

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, just cited a new Morning Consult poll, joking that he “doesn’t always believe the New York Times”.

“Seventy-five percent of Americans support extending the tax premium credit. 63% of Republicans support it, and 45% of voters say they’ll blame Republicans in Congress for a government shutdown,” Schumer said.

on Capitol Hill

Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic senator representing purple state New Hampshire, told reporters at the Capitol that she agreed with Democratic leaders’ insistence that compromising on government funding is up to the GOP.

“I think we need to get a resolution, and I think it’s doable, and I think that what’s been lacking has been a commitment from the president, who’s in charge of all three branches of government, and he doesn’t seem to be interested,” she said.

Asked if Democrats chose wisely by centering the government funding fight on healthcare, she said: “I think there are a number of fights we should be having.”

Shaheen is not running for re-election next year, leaving open a competitive Senate seat that Democrats will have to defend.

According to CNN and Punchbowl News, the Senate will continue votes on Wednesday, 1 October, before breaking for Yom Kippur. Lawmakers will also return on Friday, 3 October and Saturday, 4 October, in the event that Congress fails to pass a resolution today. They cite confirmation from the Senate majority whip, John Barrasso.

Republicans will propose their original bill, which would keep the government funded until 21 November.

Right now, senators are voting on a version of a shortterm funding bill that Democratic lawmakers wrote to counter the original resolution, written by Republicans.

CNN’s Manu Raju has just shared a discussion he captured in a Capitol hallway with Democratic congresswoman Madeleine Dean, and Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson.

In the video, Dean calls on Johnson to say that a recent deepfake video Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, which shows House minority leader with a sombrero and several racist tropes and fabricated audio.

According to Raju’s video, Johnson tells Dean that the AI-generated video is “not my style”. Dean then replies: “Not your style? It’s disgraceful. It’s racist. You should call it out.”

It ends with Johnson saying that he “loves” and “respects” Dean and her insisting that’s why she is talking to him about the video.

New — Just saw Dem Rep. Madeleine Dean confront Speaker Johnson off House floor over CR, health care, recessing chamber, Trump’s speech.

And on Trump’s AI video, Johnson says “it wasn't my style."
 
Dean: “Not your style? It's disgraceful. It's racist. You should call it out.” pic.twitter.com/Ykw8Mx2r6y

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2025

On the Senate floor, Patty Murray – who serves as the senior senator from Washington, and vice-chair of the influential appropriations committee – just said that she hopes Republicans will “come to their senses and come to the table”.

“If Republicans want to avoid a shutdown like Democrats want to avoid a shutdown, then stop spending so much time saying you will sit down with us on healthcare later,” Murray said. “Spend that time working with us right now.”

It’s worth noting something that Donald Trump said earlier, during his announcement in the Oval Office.

“We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible. Like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like,” the president said, seemingly in reference to the memo sent out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week that told federal agencies to prepare for layoffs in the event of a government shutdown. “And you all know Russell Vought. He’s become very popular recently because he can trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way.”

Vought, who is the director of the OMB, was standing beside the president during today’s announcement.

In response, top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer said the president “admitted himself that he is using Americans as political pawns”.

“He is admitting that he is doing the firing of people, if god forbid it [the shutdown] happens,” Schumer added. “Democrats do not want to shut down. We stand ready to work with Republicans to find a bipartisan compromise.”

In terms of who stands to be affected if Congress fails to pass a funding extension today, my colleague Lauren Gambino notes that approximately 750,000 federal employees will be furloughed each day of a government shutdown, according to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office released on Tuesday.

Operations deemed essential – such as social security, military duties, immigration enforcement, and air traffic control – continue, but other services may be disrupted or delayed. Mail delivery and post office operations will continue without interruption.

Agencies have been releasing updated contingency plans in the event of a shutdown. The Department of Education said nearly all its federal employees would be furloughed, while most of the Department of Homeland Security workforce would remain on the job.

The effect can be wide-ranging and potentially long-lasting. Previous shutdowns have closed national parks and the Smithsonian museums in Washington; slowed air travel; delayed food safety inspections and postponed immigration hearings.

Lauren notes that while the broader economy may not feel the effects immediately, analysts warn that a prolonged shutdown could slow growth, disrupt markets, and erode public trust.

Read Lauren’s full primer on the looming shutdown below.

Related: What is a government shutdown and why is this year’s threat more serious?

The US is set to deport some 400 Iranian people back to Iran in the coming months as part of a deal with the Iranian government, the New York Times (paywall) reports.

Iranian officials have told the paper that a US-chartered flight carrying about 100 people departed Louisiana last night and will arrive in Iran via Qatar in the next few days.

The deportation to Iran, which has one of the harshest human rights records in the world, marks “one of the starkest efforts yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants no matter the human rights conditions in countries on the receiving end”, the NYT’s report reads.

“The identities of the Iranians on the plane and their reasons for trying to immigrate to the United States were not immediately clear,” it notes. But Iranian officials add “that in nearly every case, asylum requests had been denied or the [deportees] had not yet appeared before a judge for an asylum hearing”.

Earlier today, the homepage of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) was changed to a message in bold, claiming “the Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.”

The partisan message comes after whistleblowers at the agency claimed they were fired for raising concerns about the agency dismantling efforts to enforce fair housing laws.

Here is my colleague Alice Speri’s story on today’s ruling from a federal judge that found the Trump administration’s policy to detain and deport foreign scholars over their pro-Palestinian views violates the US constitution and was designed to “intentionally” chill free speech rights.

Related: Judge issues blistering opinion against Trump policy to deport pro-Palestinian students

In a short while, Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders at 3pm EST in the Oval Office.

As of now, it’s closed press, but we’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

With the potential for another contentious government shutdown looming large, national park leaders and advocates are concerned the Trump administration could again push for leaving America’s parks open when they are unstaffed.

“National parks don’t run themselves. It is hard-working National Park Service employees that keep them safe, clean and accessible,” 40 former superintendents said in a letter issued to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, this week, urging him to close the parks if a shutdown occurs. “If sufficient staff aren’t there, visitors shouldn’t be either.”

Irreversible damage was done at popular parks, including Joshua Tree in California, following a month-long shutdown in Trump’s first term, when his administration demanded parks be kept open while funding was paused and workers were furloughed.

Without supervision, visitors left behind trails of destruction. Prehistoric petroglyphs were vandalized at Big Bend national park. Joshua trees, some more than a century old, were chopped down as trash and toilets overflowed. Tire tracks crushed sensitive plants and desert habitats from illegal off-roading vehicles in Death Valley. There were widespread reports of wildlife poaching, search-and-rescue crews were quickly overwhelmed with calls and visitor centers were broken into.

There were 26 pages of listed damages, according to Kristen Brengel, senior vice-president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, who added that those effects happened in late December and January – a season when many parks are typically quieter.

The autumn months, and October especially, still draw millions of visitors even as the peak of summer visitation begins to slow. In 2024, there were more than 28.4m recreational visits in October alone, according to data from the NPS.

Related: US national park staff fear turmoil as shutdown looms

One House Democrat told me, on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, that the “best thing” for Democrats right now is that their Republican colleagues are “refusing” to negotiate on healthcare, and “forcing the American people to get hammered with these consequences of what they’ve done”.

This Democrat added that if GOP lawmakers were to “cut some kind of deal on health care” it would “inoculate them to some extent, for the midterms in 2026”.

The Hill is reporting that the Senate is expected to vote on the Republican and Democratic versions of a stopgap funding bill at 5pm ET today.

A reminder that both failed to achieve the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber prior to last week’s congressional recess.

At the time of writing this post, government funding is set to expire in under 10 hours.

Coming soon to Miami: the Donald J Trump presidential library.

Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and his cabinet voted Tuesday morning to hand over a lucrative parcel of land for the venture, the first formal step towards a building intended to honor the legacy of the 45th and 47th president.

The unanimous vote by DeSantis and three loyalists, including the unelected Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, conveys almost three acres of prime real estate in the shadow of the Miami Freedom Tower, the iconic and recently reopened “beacon of freedom” that saw tens of thousands of Cubans enter the US during its time as an immigration processing center.

On Monday, protestors at the site, currently a parking lot for Miami Dade College’s downtown campus, highlighted the juxtaposition with a building celebrating a president who has implemented the biggest crackdown on immigration in the nation’s history.

“I look forward to the patriotic stories the Trump Library Foundation will showcase for generations to come in the Free State of Florida,” Uthmeier said in a statement following the vote.

Eric Trump, the president’s son, celebrated the news in a post to X. “It will be the greatest Presidential Library ever built, honoring the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he wrote.

Critics of the venture note that college trustees voted a week ago to transfer ownership of the land, estimated to be worth $67m, to the state without knowing what DeSantis intended to do with it.

On CNN today, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, said that “sometimes you’ve got to stand and fight” in regard to the looming shutdown.

“A fight to protect Americans who can’t afford their healthcare, is a fight worth having,” she added.

The president said that he didn’t see Democrats “bend” at all when they discussed healthcare provisions in his meeting on Monday. He spoke with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.

But when asked to clarify what he means when he talks about Democrats fighting for undocumented immigrants’ access to federal healthcare programs, when they aren’t eligible to access them, Trump didn’t answer the question.

Instead he listed off, what he described as, several achievements by the administration to curb illegal migration.

In the Oval Office, Trump just said that today’s announcement with Pfizer is “one of the biggest news conferences from a medical standpoint, that I think has ever been had by any administration”.

He also noted that he discussed these lower costs with congressional Democratic leadership at the White House yesterday.

“You know, the cost of prescription medicine is a big, I guess, a very big, more than 50% the cost of what we’re talking about. So we might be able to do something like that,” the president said.

And just like that, Donald Trump is speaking again! This time from the Oval Office and he’s making an announcement on medicine costs. I’ll bring you more on that shortly.

Well that was a lot. Stay tuned, I’ll post a summary of what we’ve just heard shortly.

He calls America “the most unstoppable force ever to walk the face of the Earth”.

He says his administration plans to make “more historic announcements” in the coming months to “fully embrace the identity of the Department of War”.

“I love the name. I think it’s so great. I think it stops wars,” Trump says. “The Department of War is going to stop wars.”

Trump says he’s debating making the military larger.

“We’re thinking about making it larger because we have so many people, and it’s nice to be able to cut people because of merit that aren’t really qualified for any reason, a physical reason, a mental reason, you don’t have to take them anymore, because you have, you have the pick of the litter, and they all want to be with you,” he says. “They all want your job. They want to be with you. They want to work with you. They’ll even take your job.”

He says “peace through strength” is back and that the US is respected again in the world.

He says the US was not respected under Biden, who was “falling down stairs every day” and adds that he is always careful when he walks down the stairs.

He says that if military or police vehicles are hit with bricks or other objects, that officers should “do whatever the hell” they want.

“You get out of that car, and you can do whatever the hell you want to do, because those people are, you now can die from that,” he says.

Portland, Oregon “looks like a war zone”, he says. “This place is a nightmare.” [Trump has authorized deployment of the national guard there but the city and state have sued the administration over the move.]

“It looks like a war zone, and I get a call from the liberal governor. ‘Sir, please don’t come in. We don’t need you.’ I said, ‘Well, unless they’re playing false tapes, this looks like World War II, your place is burning down’,” he says.

The Guardian’s Robert Mackey wrote about Portland at the weekend – and described Trump’s portrayal of the city as “entirely divorced from reality”.

He writes:

There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”. Jack Dickinson, 26, wore a chicken costume draped in an American flag and held a sign that read “Portland Will Outlive Him”. Passing motorists honked in appreciation.

Dickinson, who is from Portland and has helped organize the small but persistent protest at that location, which is going on three months, said he was not surprised to see Trump focus his attention on the city. But he called the president’s threat to have soldiers use “full force” against the protesters, whose numbers occasionally swell into the dozens, unwarranted.

Related: Portland residents scoff at Trump threat to send military: ‘This is not a war zone’

He blames “radical left lunatics, that are brilliant people but dumb as hell when it came to common sense” for his qualms with migration to the US.

He claims Canada called him a couple of weeks ago to express interest in being part of his Golden Dome missile defense system.

“They want to be part of it, to which I said, ‘Why don’t you just join our country? You become 51, become the 51st state, and you get it for free,’” he says. “They’re having a hard time up there in Canada now, because, as you know, with tariffs, everyone’s coming into our country.”

Due to political correctness, “we had people who were totally unfit to be doing what you’re doing”, he tells military leaders. “Now, it’s all based on merit.”

He starts talking about the importance of merit, before getting distracted by his love of the word tariff and claims that America is becoming “rich as hell”.

He says it’s been “such an honor” to play a role in ending conflicts around the world.

“And then we have Putin and Zelenskyy, the easiest one of them all, I said, that one, I’ll get done. I thought that was going to be first,” he says.

We’re on paper now. Trump praises “beautiful paper” and how much he loves his own signature, and criticizes Joe Biden’s previous use of an autopen – so much so he refers to the former president as “the autopen”.

“You know, when I have a general and I have to sign for a general, because we have beautiful paper. They’re gorgeous paper. I said, ‘Throw a little more gold on it. They deserve it,’” he says.

“I always think to myself, ‘How can you have an autopen sign this?’” he says. “It’s just so disrespectful to me. It’s just totally disrespectful.”

Trump has used an autopen in the past too.

Trump says that people shouldn’t “throw around” the word nuclear. “I call it the N-word. There are two N-words, and you can’t use either of them.”

“We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made,” Trump says. “Number one, you can’t detect it. There’s no way. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines.”

“Frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else,” Trump says, referring to the US nuclear arsenal. “We have better, we have newer, but it’s something we don’t ever want to even have to think about.”

He goes on a couple of tangents about the border and his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

He justifies his firing of senior generals and admirals.

He also announces he’s overhauling the Pentagon’s equal opportunity program and inspector general’s office.

“We are overhauling an inspector general process – the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues, and poor performers in the driver seat,” Hegseth says.

He also says the department will do the same with equal opportunity, a program which largely is responsible for complaints of things like sexual harassment and discrimination based on race, religion, and gender.

“No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations, no more endless waiting, no more legal limbo, no more sidetracking careers, no more walking on eggshells,” he says.

“Of course, being a racist has been illegal in our formation since 1948. The same goes for sexual harassment. Both are wrong and illegal,” he adds.

“We’re not talking hot yoga and stretching – real, hard PT,” he says.

Hegseth says troops will be required to hit height and weight requirements and take fitness tests twice a year.

Troops will be required to perform physical fitness activity every day on duty, he adds.

“Most units do that already, but we’re codifying,” he says.

He announces the first of 10 war department directives.

He says “each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat MOS for every designated combat arms position returns to the highest male standard only”.

“The era of politically correct, overly sensitive, don’t hurt anyone’s feelings leadership ends right now,” he says.

He says he wants “ruthless, dispassionate and common sense application of standards”.

He says the new war department “golden rule” is: “Do onto your unit as you would have done onto your own child’s unit.”

“Would you want him serving with fat or unfit or undertrained troops? Or alongside people who can’t make basic standards? Or in a unit where standards were lowered so certain types of troops could make it in? In a unit where leaders were promoted for reasons other than merit, performance and war-fighting? The answer’s not just no, it’s hell no,” he says.

He says he’s made it his mission “to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal”.

But there are deeper problems “beneath the woke garbage”, he adds.

“Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass headed, and we lost our way,” he says. “We became ‘the woke department’.”

“Not any more,” he adds.

He says the department has spent too long promoting “risk averse go-along to get-along conformists”.

He claims that “for too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts,” he says.

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 parties’ 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.

Related: US government heads toward first shutdown in six years as lawmakers fail to reach agreement

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 reviving the coal sector a priority of his second term amid increasing energy demand due to the proliferation of artificial intelligence data centers.

Related: Trump administration spending $625m to revive dying coal industry

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.

Related: Portland braces for deployment of 200 national guard troops to city

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?”

Related: Utah governor calls on people to ‘stop shooting each other’ after Kirk killing