White House says it’s entirely on House GOP to avoid a shutdown as deadline nears

By MJ Lee, Senior White House correspondent

(CNN) — The White House continues to argue that it is entirely up to House Republicans to avert a government shutdown: “The ball is completely in their court,” a White House official told CNN on Wednesday, just three days out from the end-of-month funding deadline.

White House aides have been tightly monitoring movements on Capitol Hill and in close contact with congressional leaders in recent days, with government funding set to expire on October 1. The White House has called on House Republicans to support the Senate’s bipartisan stopgap bill to avert a shutdown.

Asked whether a shutdown was unavoidable, President Joe Biden told reporters Wednesday afternoon: “I don’t think anything’s inevitable in politics.”

During a later fundraiser at the home of former presidential rival Tom Steyer, Biden said a shutdown would be “disastrous” and claimed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was “making a choice between the speakership and American interest.”

But as CNN has reported, even after a deal was reached in the Senate, White House officials were reticent to make predictions. Meanwhile, officials are actively preparing for a shutdown and in the process of drawing up operational plans, including on which White House personnel would and would not be furloughed starting on October 1.

The White House has largely taken a hands-off approach, with Biden aides broadly confident that Republicans will catch the blame if the government shutters. The president recorded a video this week pointing the finger at a “small group of extreme House Republicans” he said are “determined to shut down the government.”

With four days until funding expires, Senate leadership on Tuesday reached a deal that would keep the government open through November 17, with $6.2 billion in funding for Ukraine and $6 billion for domestic disasters, CNN reported. A White House official had said earlier this week that Biden would be “broadly supportive” of a Senate-brokered deal, even if it included a fraction of the $24 billion the administration was seeking to continue assisting Ukraine.

But even after that deal was struck, White House officials maintained that the ultimate outcome is unpredictable, in large part because it was impossible to guess what McCarthy’s next moves might be. McCarthy, who may see a harder-line package with steeper spending cuts as the antidote to his intra-party politics, has not committed to putting a bipartisan Senate bill on the floor for a vote.

The majority of Biden’s senior-most aides are expected to be designated “essential,” meaning they would not be furloughed, one administration official said. The contingency planning currently underway kicked off in earnest on Friday when the Office of Management and Budget began its formal process of communicating with agencies about the possibility of halting all work deemed “non-essential.”

Within the ranks of the White House, prior shutdowns have seen employees whose roles involve the title “Special Assistant to the President” – a rank that also carries access to the Navy Mess – automatically deemed to be serving in essential roles. A 2023 directory of White House staff and salaries submitted to Congress showed 97 employees with that title.

Even Biden is planning to remain in Washington this weekend, a relatively rare occurrence, as the likelihood of a shutdown looms. He typically decamps for one of his Delaware homes or Camp David on Friday afternoons, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday he would remain in the capital.

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CNN’s Nikki Carvajal contributed to this report.