Schumer warns of Doge’s ‘maximum destruction’ if government shuts down amid Democratic divide on spending bill – live

In his remarks, Chuck Schumer also reflected on the difficult choice facing Senate Democrats.

When the government spending bill was up for a vote in the House, Democrats were near-unanimous in their opposition, including several lawmakers who occupy seats vulnerable to being reclaimed by Republicans. Schumer’s insistence on passing the bill through the Senate anyway has left them in a bit of a lurch, and also led to a split within the party’s lawmakers in that chamber.

Here’s what Schumer had to say about the choice the party was facing:

Our caucus members have been torn between two awful alternatives, and my colleagues and I have wrestled with which alternative would be worse for the American people. Different senators come down on different sides of this question. But that does not mean that any Senate Democrat supports a shutdown.

Whatever the outcome, our caucus will be united in our determination to continue the long term fight to stop Donald Trump’s dangerous war on our democracy and on America’s working families.

Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer just spoke on the Senate floor and reiterated his support for the government spending bill that will prevent a shutdown from beginning at midnight.

He warned that if government funding were to lapse, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) would be free to make even more disruptive cuts to federal agencies.

“If government were to shut down, Doge has a plan in place to exploit the crisis for maximum destruction,” Schumer said.

He continued:

A shutdown will allow Doge to shift into overdrive. It would give Donald Trump and Doge the keys to the city, state and country. Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be free to destroy vital government services at a much faster rate than they can right now and over a much broader field of destruction that they would render.

In a shutdown, Donald Trump and Doge will have the power to determine what is considered essential and what is not, and their views on what is not essential would be mean and vicious, and would decimate vital services and cause unimaginable harm to the American people.

Reporters in the Capitol heard from Republican Senate majority leader John Thune, who said a few things about the struggle to pass a continuing resolution and prevent a government shutdown.

According to Punchbowl News, Thune said he has not yet spoken to Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer today, who has backed the bill even as much of the rest of his party has not.

Thune also said he may allow some amendment votes on the legislation, which could potentially offer a way to assuage Democrats’ concerns.

In addition to talking to Vladimir Putin this morning, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social a note of congratulations for Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader who said yesterday he will vote to advance a bill to fund the government:

Congratulations to Chuck Schumer for doing the right thing — Took “guts” and courage! The big Tax Cuts, L.A. fire fix, Debt Ceiling Bill, and so much more, is coming. We should all work together on that very dangerous situation. A non pass would be a Country destroyer, approval will lead us to new heights. Again, really good and smart move by Senator Schumer. This could lead to something big for the USA, a whole new direction and beginning! DJT

Schumer’s support may – emphasis on may – attract the Democratic votes necessary to move the bill, which will prevent a shutdown that is set to begin at midnight.

Donald Trump says he had a “very good and productive” phone call with Vladimir Putin and thinks “there is a very good chance” that the war in Ukraine can end.

The president’s comments come days after Ukraine said it would accept a 30-day ceasefire in the conflict, and Washington agreed to restart military and intelligence sharing.

For the latest on this breaking story, follow our Europe live blog:

JD Vance may have thought he’d receive a warm welcome at the Kennedy Center after Donald Trump moved to take the Washington DC arts center over. Not the case, as the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins and Andrew Roth report:

JD Vance, the US vice-president, was booed by the audience as he took his seat at a National Symphony Orchestra concert at Washington’s Kennedy Center on Thursday evening.

As the normal pre-concert announcements got under way, the vice-presidential party filed into the box tier. Booing and jeering erupted in the hall, drowning out the announcements, as Vance and his wife, Usha, took their seats.

Such a vocal, impassioned political protest was a highly unusual event in the normally polite and restrained world of classical music.

Vance ironically acknowledged the yelling and shouts of “You ruined this place!” with a smile and a wave.

Audience members had undergone a full Secret Service security check as Vance’s motorcade drew up at the US’s national performing arts centre, delaying the start of the concert by 25 minutes.

After news of the reaction to Vance at the concert emerged, Richard Grenell, interim director of the Kennedy Center who was recently appointed by Trump, said the crowd was “intolerant”.

We expect to have multiple opportunities to see and hear from Donald Trump today.

He’s signing executive orders at 12pm, which the White House lists as closed to press, but they’ve been known to let them in to the Oval Office with short notice.

Trump is then scheduled to make his unusual speech to the justice department at 3pm, before heading straight to Joint Base Andrews to fly to Mar-a-Lago.

When he announced his support for the continuing resolution, top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said he feared that allowing a shutdown would further empower Donald Trump and Elon Musk to disrupt and eliminate federal government operations.

“Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel non-essential, furloughing staff with no promise that would ever be rehired,” the Senate minority leader said.

And indeed, that is a potential outcome, as Republican senator Markwayne Mullin hinted to Politico:

The Democrats have A or B: Keep the government open or yield the authority to the president.

Here’s more on Schumer’s controversial reasoning for backing the spending bill:

The Senate is scheduled to today convene at 10am with a range of business before it.

Consideration of the continuing resolution, which is the bill to fund the government through September and head off a shutdown that will otherwise begin at midnight, will come no earlier than 1.15pm, when the chamber is scheduled to begin voting.

But with Democrats split over whether to supply the necessary eight votes to advance the legislation, don’t be surprised if the chamber stays in session into the night figuring this out.

Also, a note on the math: the GOP controls the chamber, with 53 seats to the Democrats and their allies’ 47. But the minority party can filibuster most legislation, including this continuing resolution, which requires 60 votes to overcome – essentially seven Democratic votes.

However, Republican senator Rand Paul says he will not vote for the bill, so, in this case, the GOP needs eight Democratic votes to get it through.

The looming midnight deadline for Congress to approve a government spending measure or cause a shutdown has left Democrats in a tough spot.

When the bill was up for a vote in the House, every single Democrat voted against it save one. It’s now in the Senate, where many Democrats say they are ready to vote it down, citing cuts it would make to non-defense spending. But the minority leader Chuck Schumer made the shock decision yesterday to announce he would vote to advance the measure, a sign that enough Democratic votes exist for it to clear the 60-vote threshold needed for passage in the Senate.

That’s sparked not an insignificant amount of tension in the party, which is reeling from its underperformance in the November election but split over whether voters will blame them for a shutdown, or instead focus their ire on Donald Trump and the Republicans, who control both the House and Senate.

Not longer after Schumer announced his support for the measure, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar released a statement reiterating their opposition to the funding bill – the subtext being that Democratic senators should hold firm against its passage:

Instead of working with Democrats in a bipartisan way to prevent a government shutdown, House Republicans left town in order to jam their extreme partisan legislation down the throats of the American people. The far-right Republican funding bill will unleash havoc on everyday Americans, giving Donald Trump and Elon Musk even more power to continue dismantling the federal government.

House Democrats are ready to vote for a four-week continuing resolution that keeps the government open and returns all parties to the negotiating table. That is the best way forward.

Donald Trump and Republicans are crashing the economy. They plan to take a chainsaw to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and public schools – all in order to give massive tax cuts to their billionaire donors and wealthy corporations. House Democrats will not be complicit. We remain strongly opposed to the partisan spending bill under consideration in the Senate.

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday signaled that next month’s US tariffs could be imposed on cars from all countries, including South Korea, Japan and Germany, according to Reuters.

Asked if president Donald Trump’s planned 2 April tariffs would impact automobiles coming from countries such as South Korea, Japan and Germany, he told Fox Business:

That would be fair, right? If you’re going to tariff cars from anywhere, it’s got to be tariffing cars from everywhere.”

Donald Trump has threatened a 200% tariff on wine and champagne from European Union countries, in the latest threat of escalation in the global trade war started by the US president against the country’s biggest trading partners.

Trump said in a post on Thursday on his Truth Social platform that the tariffs on all alcoholic products from the bloc would be retaliation for a “nasty” 50% levy on American bourbon whiskey announced by the EU.

The EU’s action against bourbon whiskey – due to come into force on 1 April – was itself part of a €26bn ($28bn) response to Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, which came into effect on Wednesday.

Trump claims the US’s trading partners have taken advantage of the US and that tariffs will help him to bring back jobs – a theory that is roundly rejected by most mainstream economists.

The tariffs on the EU, Canada, Mexico and China – and those imposed in retaliation – threaten to tip the US economy into recession, and Trump has admitted there may be a “period of transition” while businesses start producing more in the US.

The White House has so far shrugged off the concerns of investors, after his tariff announcements were greeted with heavy stock market sell-offs that have wiped out all of the share price gains since his election in November.

Despite starting the trade war, Trump appeared to be infuriated by the EU’s retaliatory measures.

He wrote:

If this Tariff is not removed immediately, the U.S. will shortly place a 200% Tariff on all WINES, CHAMPAGNES, & ALCOHOLIC PRODUCTS COMING OUT OF FRANCE AND OTHER E.U. REPRESENTED COUNTRIES.

This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.”

The US already circumvents the protected geographical origin rules on European products – American supermarkets are full of US-made imitations of champagne and other delicacies such as parmesan and gorgonzola.

President Donald Trump is to visit the justice department on Friday to rally support for his administration’s tough-on-crime agenda, an appearance expected to double as a victory lap after he emerged legally and politically unscathed from two federal prosecutions that were dismissed after his election win last fall, reports the Associated Press.

“I’m going to set out my vision,” the Republican president said on Thursday about the purpose for a visit the White House is billing as “historic.”

The venue selection for the speech underscores Trump’s keen interest in the department and desire to exert influence over it after criminal investigations that shadowed his first four years in office and subsequent campaign.

The visit, the first by Trump and the first by any president in a decade, brings him into the belly of an institution he has disparaged in searing terms for years but one that he has sought to reshape by installing loyalists and members of his personal defence team in top leadership positions, reports the AP.

Although there’s some precedent for presidents to speak to the justice department workforce from the building’s ceremonial great hall, Trump’s trip two months into his second term is particularly striking. That’s because of his unique status as a onetime criminal defendant indicted by the agency he is now poised to address and because his remarks are likely to feature an airing of grievances over his exposure to the criminal justice system – including an FBI search in 2022 of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, for classified documents.

Trump’s visit also comes at a time when attorney general Pam Bondi has asserted that the department needs to be depoliticised even as critics assert agency leadership is injecting politics into the decision-making process.

Here’s a bit more detail, via Reuters, on the Axios report that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has warned Congress has a funding shortfall of $2bn for this fiscal year.

Congress will send Ice an extra $500m as part of the stopgap spending bill, although that will not cover the funding it needs to continue work till end of September, the report said, citing two sources familiar with the communications.

The funding shortfall comes as Ice has stepped arrests since president Donald Trump took office in January. He has vowed to deport record numbers of people who migrated to the US illegally.

Ice detention facilities are filled to capacity at 47,600 detainees and the agency has been expanding its bed count – the number of beds available for detainees – with support from the US defence department, the US Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prisons (BoP).

The agency has an annual budget of approximately $8bn, according to its website, reports Reuters. The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a stopgap bill to keep federal agencies funded. The bill would extend government funding until the end of the fiscal year on 30 September. Increases in defence, veterans’ care and border security would be offset by cuts to some domestic programmes.

Ice was working with US lawmakers to secure more detention funding, an official from the agency told reporters on Wednesday, according to Reuters.

The White House and Ice did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has warned that Donald Trump’s trade war could expose the electric carmaker to retaliatory tariffs that would also affect other automotive manufacturers in the US.

In an unsigned letter to Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, Tesla said it “supports fair trade” but that the US administration should ensure it did not “inadvertently harm US companies”.

Tesla said in the letter:

As a US manufacturer and exporter, Tesla encourages the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to consider the downstream impacts of certain proposed actions taken to address unfair trade practices.”

The company, led by Musk, a close ally of Trump who is leading efforts to downsize the federal government, said it wanted to avoid a similar impact to previous trade disputes that resulted in increased tariffs on electric vehicles imported into countries targeted by the US.

Tesla said:

US exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to US trade actions. The assessment undertaken by USTR of potential actions to rectify unfair trade should also take into account exports from the United States.

For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on electric vehicles imported into those countries.”

Trump has imposed significant tariffs that will affect vehicles and parts made around the world.

The EU and Canada have announced large-scale retaliations for tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, while the UK has so far held off on announcing any countermeasures.

Tesla’s share price has fallen by more than a third over the last month over concerns about a potential buyer backlash against Musk, who has shown support for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, theatrically brandished a chainsaw at a conservative conference, and accused Keir Starmer and other senior politicians of covering up a scandal over grooming gangs.

This week Trump said he was buying a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “radical left lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting the EV company – a day after Tesla’s worst share price fall in almost five years.