US House Speaker John Boehner speaks to the press at the US Capitol in
Washington on October 1, 2013. The White House budget director late
September 30, 2013 ordered federal agencies to begin closing down after
Congress failed to pass a budget to avert a government shutdown. AFP
WASHINGTON
The
United States lurched into a dreaded government shutdown Tuesday for
the first time in 17 years, after Congress failed to end a bitter budget
row after hours of dizzying brinkmanship.
Ten minutes
before midnight, the White House budget office issued an order for many
government departments to start closing down, triggering 800,000
furloughs of federal workers, and shutting tourists out of monuments
like the Statue of Liberty, national parks and museums.
Prospects
for a swift resolution of the mess were unclear. And economists say the
struggling US economic recovery could suffer if the shutdown drags on
for a matter of weeks.
Only workers deemed essential
will be at their desks from Tuesday onwards, leaving government
departments like the White House with skeletal staff.
Vital functions like mail delivery and air traffic control will continue as normal, however.
UGLY RHETORIC
On
a day of dysfunction and ugly rhetoric in the divided US political
system, Republicans had repeatedly tied new government funding to
attempts to defund, delay or dismantle President Barack Obama's
signature health care law.
But each time their effort
was killed by Obama's allies in the Democratic-led Senate, leaving the
government in limbo when its money ran out at the end of the fiscal year
at midnight Monday.
"This is an unnecessary blow to
America," a sombre Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate
floor two minutes after the witching hour.
Obama,
heralding the first government shutdown since 1996, told US troops in a
video that they deserved better from Congress, and promised to work to
get the government reopened soon.
The president's team
sent out a tweet from his official account soon after the shutdown went
into effect reading "they actually did it, a group of Republicans in the
House just forced a government shutdown over Obamacare instead of
passing a real budget."
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Obama's
budget director urged Congress to swiftly pass bridge financing that
would allow the government to open again.
"Agencies should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations," she said in a memo.
Obama
had earlier accused Republicans of holding America to ransom with their
"extreme" political demands, while his opponents struck back at his
party's supposed arrogance.
House Speaker John Boehner rebuked Obama in a fiery floor speech after an unproductive call with the president.
"I didn't come here to shut down the government," Boehner said. "The American people don't want a shutdown, and neither do I."
GOOD FAITH
Republicans
accuse Obama of refusing to negotiate in good faith, but the White
House says Obamacare is settled law and says there is no way to stop it
from going into force, with a goal of providing affordable health care
to all Americans.
The crisis is rooted in the long
running campaign by "Tea Party" Republicans in the House to overturn or
disable Obamacare -- the president's principal domestic political
achievement -- key portions of which also come into force on Tuesday.
More
broadly, the shutdown is the most serious crisis yet in a series of
rolling ideological skirmishes between Democrat Obama and House
Republicans over the size of the US government and its role in national
life.
"One faction of one party in one house of
Congress in one branch of government doesn't get to shut down the entire
government just to re-fight the results of an election," Obama said,
referring to his own re-election.
"You don't get to
extract a ransom for doing your job, for doing what you're supposed to
be doing anyway," he said, in a stern televised statement at the White
House.
With its legislative maneuvers repeatedly
blocked by the Senate, the House, led by Boehner tried a new gambit,
minutes before midnight.
The majority party called for a conference with the Senate, in which formal negotiators would thrash out a budget deal.
That
process was already showing signs that it would take hours to
coordinate, and Reid sent the Senate into recess until Tuesday morning.
"We
said we'd go to conference if they wouldn't shut the government down,
but they're shutting the government down," number two Senate Democrat
Dick Durbin told AFP.
SWIFT END
Conferences
designed to meld duelling legislation passed by the House and the
Senate can often take days or weeks to play out, so the prospects of a
swift end to the shutdown seemed uncertain.
Obama
warned that a government shutdown could badly damage an economy which
has endured a sluggish recovery from the worst recession in decades.
"A
shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right
away. Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy significantly," Obama
said.
Consultants Macroeconomic Advisors said it would slow growth, recorded at a 2.5 per cent annual pace in the second quarter.
A two-week shutdown would cut 0.3 percentage point off of gross domestic production.
It
would also have a painful personal impact on workers affected --
leaving them to dip into savings or delay mortgage payments, monthly car
loan bills and other spending.
Stocks on Monday
retreated as traders braced for the shutdown. The Dow Jones Industrial
Average was down 128.57 points (0.84 per cent) to 15,129.67.
Markets are likely to be even more traumatized if there is no quick solution to the next fast approaching crisis.
Republicans
are also demanding Obama make concessions in the health care law to
secure a lifting of the current $16.7 trillion debt ceiling, without
which the United States would begin to default on its debts for the
first time in history by the middle of October.
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