US govt shutdown: White House firings on hold, Senate to vote fifth time on stopgap funding

US President Donald Trump has put mass-firing of government workers on hold until the Senate’s vote on a stopgap funding bill on Monday, according to Kevin Hasset, his top economic adviser.

“I think that everybody’s still hopeful that when we get a fresh start at the beginning of the week, that we can get the Democrats to see that it’s just common sense to avoid layoffs like that,” Hasset told CNN on Sunday, referring to the Senate vote.

The Senate will convene at 3 pm local time on Monday and the vote is scheduled for 5:30 pm on a stopgap funding bill.

Hasset said that the failure to pass the bill will lead to mass-firings that have been threatened for days. Hopes for the bill’s passage are not high as both sides remain far from any middle ground.

Hasset told CNN, “I think that if the president decides that the negotiations are absolutely going nowhere that there will start to be layoffs. We think the Democrats, there’s a chance that they’ll be reasonable. Let’s get back into town on Monday, and if they are then I think there’s no reason for those layoffs.”

Meanwhile, unions representing hundreds of thousands of government workers have approached a judge to block any mass-firings in the works, according to Bloomberg.

Unions have argued that Trump does not have any legal authority to fire government workers during a “lapse” in appropriations from Congress, the report said.

As per norms, whenever the shutdown ends, furloughed workers who worked without pay or were sent home receive backpay. Currently, around 750,000 workers have been furloughed.

In the Senate, Republicans have continued to blame Democrats for not agreeing to pass their version of a stopgap bill. Democrats have refused to pass any bill that does not roll back Trump’s Medicaid cuts and renew expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that make health insurance less expensive for people. But Republicans have framed these demands as Democrats wanting taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage for illegal immigrants and have rejected these calls.