US GOVERNMENT FACES SHUTDOWN

The US government has partly been shut down after last-minute efforts by lawmakers to approve a spending bill which stalled.

Funds to fund the federal government expired at 00:01 EDT (04:01 GMT) on Wednesday after Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate rejected one another's rival stopgap proposals.
While the US government has partially shut down more than a dozen times since 1980, threats by President Donald Trump to leverage the budget standoff to deeply pare back the public sector have threatened levels of disruption greater than have occurred in past shutdowns.

Speaking at a White House briefing with reporters on Tuesday, Trump warned that he would use the shutdown to take actions that are "bad" for Democrats.

"Things that can't be undone, that are bad for them, and can't be undone on their part, like cutting massive groups of individuals out, cutting things they like, cutting programmes that they like," Trump defined, adding that "a lot of good" can be achieved through government shutdowns.
The shutdown, the first since 2018, means that some government services are non-essential and come to an end, including the release of key economic data and approvals of small business loans.

Essential workers, such as police and military personnel and air traffic controllers, will remain on duty, but won't be paid for the shutdown period.
Social security and food stamps will continue to be paid.

While hundreds of thousands of federal employees were temporarily sent home and received back pay when they were called back to work during previous shutdowns, Trump now indicated that he might be employing the current shutdown to "fire a lot of people."

"And they're Democrats; they're going to be Democrats," Trump asserted.
In a previous Fox News interview, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune was hopeful that enough Democrats would cross the aisle to pass his party's "clean" bill in a second vote on Wednesday.

"This was all unnecessary. This was all done to appease their left political base," Thune said.

With Friday's current budget deficit, the US government has shut down 15 times since 1980, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The longest shutdown in US history, lasting 34 days, took place in late 2018 and early 2019, during Trump’s first term as president.