WASHINGTON -- The government shutdown that has halted paychecks for hundreds of thousands of federal workers began its third week Saturday with no end in sight, as Vice President Mike Pence, top White House officials and senior congressional aides met for more than two hours without reaching a deal to reopen the government.
Inside the meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Pence refused to budge from the more than $5 billion President Donald Trump has demanded from Congress to pay for a portion of his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to two Democratic officials briefed on the negotiations.
The standoff -- which has heavily affected national parks and other operations and threatens to halt payments as varied as food stamps and tax refunds -- has made Trump's unrealized border wall the linchpin of his presidency as he seeks to make good on a signature campaign promise.
The two sides are scheduled to meet again this afternoon, but there was little hope that the broad divide between Trump and Democrats over his demand for wall funding would be bridged anytime soon. Saturday's talks came a day after Trump said the government shutdown could continue for "months or even years" if Democrats did not relent on their steadfast refusal to grant him the wall money.
The White House said funding was not discussed in-depth, but the administration was clear that it needed funding for a wall and that it wanted to resolve the shutdown all at once.
While Trump has stood by his $5.7 billion demand, Senate Democrats have offered $1.3 billion for border security, including fencing, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, and the top Senate Democrat, Charles Schumer of New York, have repeatedly said that they will not agree to any wall funding. Pelosi has called a border wall an "immorality."
The vice president's office said that Pence had reiterated the president's position that any deal needed to include funding for the wall. The office also said that Democrats had requested additional information from the Department of Homeland Security about its needs to deal with border issues.
Pence was deputized by Trump to oversee Saturday's talks, but he did not have the president's blessing to float new or specific numbers as he did last month in a meeting with Schumer, according to two Trump aides who were not authorized to speak publicly. That meant few specifics were discussed Saturday, as Democratic staff members repeatedly pushed the administration to reopen the federal government and negotiate differences over the border after the shutdown ends.
But the administration -- represented by Pence, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and senior adviser Jared Kushner -- refused, according to multiple officials.
"Not much headway made today," Trump tweeted Saturday afternoon. "Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!"
Before the meeting began Saturday morning, Trump took a combative tone in several Twitter messages and claimed that news coverage documenting cracks in Republican support for his hard-line position were inaccurate.
"Great support coming from all sides for Border Security (including Wall) on our very dangerous Southern Border," Trump tweeted. "Teams negotiating this weekend! Washington Post and NBC reporting of events, including Fake sources, has been very inaccurate (to put it mildly)!"
Trump spent much of Saturday on the phone with allies, talking through his positioning on the shutdown and hearing their reviews of his Friday news conference in the Rose Garden, according to a person close to him. Two people regularly on his call list -- Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. -- have encouraged Trump to hold fast and refuse to agree to reopen the government unless wall funding is secured, the person said.
"I've never seen the president as resolved on any issue as he is on this," Meadows said Saturday. "But he is open to new ideas about how to end the impasse."
During Saturday's meeting, Democratic aides asked the White House to lay out in formal detail the administration's funding request for the border -- including its specific security requests, what the money would be used for, and what in the Homeland Security budget the administration would cut to make the numbers work, people familiar with the meeting said.
Democrats "emphasized that it's important for us to have an updated budget request from the White House because they have been all over the map," said another official briefed on the discussion. The White House plans to provide those figures before the group meets again this afternoon.
With talks stalled Saturday, Pelosi announced that House Democrats plan to start approving individual bills to reopen shuttered agencies starting with the Treasury Department to ensure Americans receive their tax refunds.
"While President Trump threatens to keep the government shut down for 'years,' Democrats are taking immediate further action to reopen government, so that we can meet the needs of the American people, protect our borders and respect our workers," Pelosi said.
Some centrist Republicans on Saturday urged Trump and congressional leaders to reopen the government, reflecting growing unease in their ranks about the prolonged shutdown and the political cost the GOP might pay.
"With Nancy Pelosi as speaker, it's going to have to be a compromise solution," Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., a moderate and former FBI agent who represents the Philadelphia suburbs, said in an interview. "It's our most basic function as members of Congress to fund the government, and we need to have these battles on immigration and other issues on their own turf, separately."
A number of Republicans, including Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., have said in recent days that a shutdown is not the "right answer."
On Friday, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., became the third member of his party in the Senate to call for an end to the shutdown, joining Gardner and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
In an op-ed article for the newspaper The Hill published Friday evening, Tillis encouraged Congress to strike a deal that would provide "long-term certainty to the DACA population" -- the participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program who were brought to the United States as children -- and "force out the extreme elements on either side of the aisle."
"When it comes to securing our borders, it's important to note that the real solution is not going to be a big, literal physical wall, but rather an all-the-above, all-hands-on-deck approach," he wrote, adding his support for solutions including "physical barriers and steel fences."
In an interview with NBC's Meet the Press, set to air today, Mulvaney argued that the administration was willing to deal. He said Trump was willing to forgo a concrete wall for steel or other materials.
"If he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence to do that so that Democrats can say, 'See? He's not building a wall anymore,' that should help us move in the right direction,'" Mulvaney said.
White House senior aides were to depart late Saturday for Camp David for a staff retreat where discussions about policy and priorities for 2019 are to be planned, and the president is expected to join them today. Mulvaney is spearheading the gathering as a way of connecting with his new deputies and colleagues, according to officials.
On Friday, federal agencies were directed to hold off on enacting pay raises for top administration officials during the shutdown.
The guidance was issued in a memo from Margaret Weichert, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.
The raises were the result of a pay freeze for top federal officials, including the vice president and Cabinet secretaries, that was on the verge of expiring because of the shutdown.
In the memo, Weichert writes that, "In the current absence of Congressional guidance," the Office of Personnel Management "believes it would be prudent for agencies to continue to pay these senior political officials at the frozen rate until appropriations legislation is enacted that would clarify the status of the freeze."
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said earlier Friday that the administration was "aware of the issue" and "exploring options to prevent this from being implemented while some federal workers are furloughed."
Trump had also told reporters that he "might consider" asking Cabinet secretaries and other top officials to forgo the raises. Pence committed to doing so.
Sanders, in her statement, called the raises "another unnecessary byproduct of the shutdown" and put the onus on Congress, saying it "can easily take care of this by funding the government and securing our borders."
Information for this article was contributed by Seung Min Kim, Robert Costa and Anne Gearan of The Washington Post; by Catherine Lucey, Lisa Mascaro and Jill Colvin of The Associated Press; and by Michael Tackett and Catie Edmondson of The New York Times.
A Section on 01/06/2019