U.S. Government Shutdown Enters Fifth Day – The Wall Street Journal

“I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security,” Mr. Trump tweeted earlier this week. “At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!”

The shutdown, the third of the year, started early Saturday after Mr. Trump and House Republicans upended a bipartisan Senate agreement to fund the government through Feb. 8. The president has indefinitely delayed his holiday trip to Florida as the White House negotiates with lawmakers.

Both the House and Senate are scheduled to convene on Thursday, but it wasn’t clear how much progress negotiations would make this week. White House officials predicted this weekend that the shutdown could last into 2019.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said earlier this week that different officials from the White House were saying “different things about what the president would accept or not accept to end his Trump Shutdown, making it impossible to know where they stand at any given moment.”

“The president wanted the shutdown, but he seems not to know how to get himself out of it,” the Democratic leaders said in a joint statement.

Congressional leaders reached an agreement last week to skip any votes until a deal reopening the government has been struck, enabling rank-and-file lawmakers to return home. If a spending deal is cut, lawmakers will be given 24 hours’ notice to return to Washington to vote on it.

In the most recent round of negotiations, Vice President Mike Pence and incoming chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made Mr. Schumer an offer on Saturday that included at least $2.5 billion in border-security funding, according to aides, but the restrictions around the funding weren’t clear.

Democrats have said they support including funds for border security, but not a physical wall, which they say is ineffective and wasteful. Mr. Trump has said funding border security will be pointless without a wall to secure the border.

Mr. Schumer rejected the latest White House offer, saying the two sides remained far apart.

Spending bills require 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-49 majority, giving Democrats leverage in the talks.

Mr. Trump met with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other DHS officials Monday to discuss border security, after which he said that he awarded a contract for a 115-mile section of border wall, saying it was “another large section of the wall in Texas,” although he didn’t provide any details.

Mr. Trump has also said that the cost to taxpayers of the wall will be compensated by savings and revenue generated from the newly signed U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement, but many experts are unclear about how that would work.

Last week, the Senate passed a bill to fund the government through Feb. 8 that would extend current border-security funding, including for fencing, levees and technology but not a concrete wall. Republicans said those funds constitute wall money, while Democrats said that is border security, not wall funding.

Mr. Trump had initially demanded that Congress include $5 billion in border-wall funding as part of any year-end spending bill. But in a series of quick reversals last week, he appeared to back off that demand, prompting the Senate to pass the stopgap spending bill with no border-wall funding under the belief he would sign it. Buoyed by House Republicans demanding a bigger fight over the wall, Mr. Trump threatened to veto that bill, upending the negotiations and leading to Saturday’s shutdown.

Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com