Updated September 30, 2025 at 9:05 PM EDT
Two bills to fund the government have failed in the Senate, leaving Congress careening toward a shutdown with hours to go before a midnight deadline.
Democratic and Republican leaders remain at an impasse over funding negotiations and expiring health care subsidies. Each party backed their own short-term funding bill to avert a shutdown Tuesday, but neither could win enough support from across the aisle to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to pass.
"Democrats may have chosen to shut down the government tonight, but we can reopen it tomorrow," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters after the failed votes. "All it takes is a handful of Democrats to join Republicans to pass the clean, non-partisan funding bill that's in front of us."
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was the sole Republican to vote against the GOP-backed bill.
Two Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, along with Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, broke ranks and voted in favor of the GOP-led bill.
Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said those three votes indicate there's bipartisan support to get the continuing resolution across the finish line.
"The cracks are beginning to show," he said.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., insisted that bipartisan negotiations will be needed to move enough Democrats into a position where they would vote to extend funding.
"Republicans are plunging America into a shutdown, rejecting bipartisan talks, pushing a partisan bill and risking America's health care," Schumer said during his own post-vote remarks. "We hope they sit down with us and talk. Otherwise, it's the Republicans who will be driving us straight towards a shutdown tonight and at midnight, and the American people will blame them for bringing the federal government to a halt."
Most Senate Democrats refused to back the GOP bill, which the House passed narrowly earlier this month, in an effort to force Republicans to negotiate on federal health care subsidies. Their bill included an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, and also repealed cuts to health care programs that were enacted by the GOP's tax and spending bill passed earlier this summer.
Republicans have said negotiations on the subsidies should be separate from the government funding debate.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and dozens of other House Democrats gathered outside the Capitol earlier on Tuesday with people who rely on the health programs Democrats are pushing to shore up. Many House Democrats are in Washington even though the full House is not in session.
"House Democrats are on duty," Jeffries, D-N.Y., said. "House Republicans are on vacation."
The standoff over spending could have major consequences for federal workers and people who rely on government services, particularly as the White House threatens to permanently fire some federal workers deemed nonessential in a shutdown.
Shortly after the votes ended, the Office of Management and Budget posted a memo on social media telling agencies to execute their shutdown plans.
— Office of Management and Budget (@WHOMB) September 30, 2025
The move is a dramatic escalation in the increasingly frequent battle over federal spending.
View from Pennsylvania Avenue
The failed votes came a day after top Congressional leadership in both parties went to the White House to meet with President Trump and Vice President Vance.
But the players walked away saying major differences remained. Democrats vowed to continue to push for concessions on health care. Vance accused Democrats of holding government funding hostage.
"I think we're headed to a shutdown because the Democrats won't do the right thing," Vance said. "I hope they change their mind, but we're going to see."
Schumer maintained after the meeting that it's on Republicans to negotiate a bipartisan agreement.
"Their bill has not one iota of Democratic input. That is never how we've done this before," said Schumer. "When I was leader, we negotiated four times with Republicans, and we never had a shutdown. And so it's up to the Republicans whether they want a shutdown or not."
Trump went on to taunt Democrats after the meeting. He posted a racist AI-generated video on social media. It included mariachi music in the background and an image of Jeffries with a sombrero and a drawn-on mustache. This was accompanied by a vulgar, crudely deep-faked voiceover of Schumer denigrating Democrats.
Jeffries addressed the video in a social media response, saying, "Bigotry will get you nowhere."
Trump has falsely claimed the Democratic-backed extensions for health care subsidies would "give health care" to people living in the U.S. without legal status, despite such individuals being ineligible.
He also warned that if the government does run out of funding, Democrats may be "taking a risk," alluding to the possibility of mass firings of federal workers and the elimination of programs that Democrats support.
"We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them," Trump said. "We can cut large numbers of people. We don't want to do that, but we don't want fraud, waste and abuse."
Schumer responded to that directly on Tuesday, saying the president was using the public as "pawns."
"Trump admitted himself that he is using Americans as political pawns," he said. "He is admitting that he is doing the firing of people if, God forbid, it happens."
Lawmakers dig in
The positions of lawmakers from both parties appeared to harden on Monday evening, and most signaled no viable path to averting a shutdown. House Democrats gathered at the Capitol, but Speaker Johnson has not called the chamber back into session for votes, and it's likely to stay out of session as a shutdown starts.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., told reporters Monday there was still time for some sort of solution, but GOP lawmakers were ignoring a major problem if they insisted on no provisions to deal with increasing costs.
"They must not be talking to the people I'm talking to in Georgia who are hurting and who cannot afford this astronomical hike that we are going to see in their health care premiums. People can't afford that."
Schumer's latest strategy comes almost six months after he and several other Senate Democrats voted to advance a GOP stopgap plan that avoided a government shutdown and pushed back the deadline to September. The move infuriated many within the Democratic base and fueled calls for the party to fight harder against Trump's agenda.
Republicans argue the stopgap bill allows the committees negotiating the spending bills more time to finish bipartisan spending bills.
"I think it will send a real sense of confidence across the country that we're actually capable of doing the very basics of our job up here," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told reporters in the Capitol on Monday. Rounds said he and other Republicans are open to addressing health care costs. "Even though none of us were supportive of the ACA to begin with, we can't walk away from the people who have had no place else to go to get their health care coverage."
What's affected in a shutdown?
While critical services such as Social Security and payments from Medicare and Medicaid would continue, there could be delays in processing new applications for those programs.
In a shutdown, anything deemed nonessential is put on hold, so Americans could experience delays in certain services and hundreds of thousands of federal workers will go without pay.
In a move to seemingly raise the stakes, the White House's budget arm issued a memo that instructed federal agencies to prepare to lay off workers permanently, instead of the traditional temporary furlough.
Congressional Democrats panned the memo as an intimidation tactic.
"This is nothing less than mafia-style blackmail," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told NPR. "Essentially, the president is threatening to fire dedicated federal employees who have nothing to do with the ongoing political and policy dispute."
Typically, the White House budget office would collect and release agency shutdown plans. This time, each individual agency is responsible for posting and sharing its plans, which has caused a confusing patchwork of information for those seeking to understand the scope of a potential shutdown. However, the White House is saying the Women, Infants and Children program, known as WIC, will be among the programs hit quickest in a shutdown. The program provides nutrition assistance and health care screenings to mothers and young children.
NPR's Tamara Keith and Elena Moore contributed to this report.
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