WASHINGTON — The House hasn’t been seen in weeks. The Senate is at a standstill. Bipartisan negotiations are nonexistent. And the White House seems more interested in making punitive threats against its own federal workforce than in trying to get them back to work.

This is the bleak state of Republican-controlled government under President Donald Trump on the eighth day of a government shutdown that has disrupted federal services, left thousands of federal employees on furlough, and caused ground stops at some airports due to shortages of air traffic controllers. The deepening impasse has many lawmakers in a pessimistic mood, raising fears of a protracted and painful battle that could go on for several more weeks.

“The first couple of days I was pretty sanguine about prospects of coming out of it, but it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse, and I think we’re going to be dug in for a while,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told HuffPost when asked about the state of play on Capitol Hill.

What makes this standoff over spending different from previous shutdowns — in 2019, 2018 and 2013 — is how dug in both parties are to their respective positions, how little urgency there is to reach a compromise, and how angry Democrats are about Trump’s abuse of executive powers to rescind or withhold money approved by Congress.

Democrats Are Fed Up

Andrew Harnik via Getty Images

In March, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) faced widespread intraparty backlash after he helped pass a Republican spending bill to avert a shutdown. Since then, the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in federal funding, shuttered several executive agencies, deployed military troops to major U.S. cities, weaponized the Justice Department against his critics, bullied law firms and universities, and launched a widespread national crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Democrats are now demanding that, at the least, the Trump administration agree to stop freezing or rescinding more federal funds if they vote for a bill reopening the government. What reason, Democratic lawmakers ask, do they have to support a spending bill that in effect supports Trump’s lawlessness and puts no guardrails on the executive branch?

Moreover, Democrats want to address enhanced Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. If Congress doesn’t act, and soon, premiums will more than double on average for over 20 million people enrolled in the health care program. Four million people are estimated to lose their insurance entirely.

A recent poll found three-quarters of the public, including a majority of Trump’s MAGA supporters, say they want Congress to extend the subsidies, stiffening Democrats’ resolve this time around.

“We need to get serious about fixing the problems here at home, starting with health care,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech on Tuesday. “And Democrats’ position has not changed: We want the same thing that a majority, an overwhelming majority, of Americans want, which is to end this shutdown and halt the health care crisis that will send premiums spiking for tens of millions of people.”

Republicans maintain there’s nothing to negotiate until Senate Democrats vote to reopen the government, accusing them of holding hostage government funding over unrelated policy demands — a tactic the GOP also employed in previous shutdown fights. They maintain that they are willing to discuss the enhanced ACA subsidies, which Democrats passed during the pandemic, but the issue has sharply divided GOP lawmakers in both the House and Senate, and it is unclear whether they’d be willing to take it up or pass a fix by the end of the year.

“The Democrats want to have a conversation about the COVID tax credit cliff that they created, and at some point we’re happy to have that conversation, but not until the government opens up,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters on Tuesday.

Negotiations? What Negotiations?

During previous shutdowns, the president of the United States — including Trump himself — hosted congressional leaders multiple times at the White House to discuss a way to reopen the government. Bipartisan Senate groups took matters into their own hands to help move things along, holding private talks that eventually yielded a compromise.

This time around, Trump convened one meeting with all four congressional leaders at the White House, but he didn’t do so until the eve of the funding deadline of Sept. 30. It went nowhere.

In the Senate, meanwhile, there’s been no formation of a group or committee tasked with coming up with a deal. Rank-and-file members have instead held informal discussions on the floor that have made little progress. The House isn’t even in session at all and isn’t expected to return until Tuesday — three weeks after it last held votes.

“There is, you know, conglomerations of different people and groups, but it’s been very informal,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “The basic dichotomy here is [Speaker Mike] Johnson and Trump and [Senate GOP leader John] Thune won’t give us a vote before the shutdown is ended. It’s hard to negotiate when Johnson isn’t even having his members come back before Oct. 14.”

“They simply will not talk, which seems different from past years,” he added. “We want to sit down with Trump. We want to sit down with Johnson. They’re basically saying, vote for the bill, and then we’ll talk.”

A big reason lawmakers have struggled to reach a deal is the deep lack of trust in Washington in recent years. The Trump administration has repeatedly ripped up prior bipartisan spending agreements, controversial moves that have poisoned the well with Democrats and made it harder for them to accept a short-term funding bill, as even some Republicans have acknowledged.

“There has to be enough trust that a deal can be made,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told HuffPost.

He then pondered, hopefully: “Is there some condition that can be achieved, that you can have a trustless society in the sense where we can still go forward, but not necessarily trust each other?”

‘Intimidation Tactics’

In an effort to cow Democrats into submission, the White House Office of Management and Budget has threatened several punitive measures against its own government, including enacting mass firings of furloughed employees and suggesting that those on furlough won’t necessarily get paid back when the government eventually reopens.

This isn’t what happened under Trump’s first presidency after the government shut down in 2019, the longest shutdown in history, when he demanded Democrats agree to fund construction of his border wall. Trump actually signed a bill into law codifying what had been a bipartisan tradition of authorizing back pay for furloughed federal workers after government shutdowns.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

But the White House threats backfired on Capitol Hill as Democrats vowed to stand firm in their demands, and even some Republican lawmakers voiced their disagreement.

“These intimidation tactics are making it clear that they are not acting in any good faith,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “So for people who think you’re going to cut a deal with these guys and they’re going to live up to the deal, they’re showing you every single day that they’re only interested in dirty politics.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a retiring moderate Democrat who has been involved in bipartisan discussions about a deal to reopen the government and address the expiring health care insurance subsidies, was even more blunt about OMB Director Russ Vought.

“It would be a lot easier to resolve the situation if Russ Vought would stop talking,” she told HuffPost.

It wasn’t just Democrats crying foul, either. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called the threats from the White House “bad strategy.”

“I think that if you’re talking about my staff and other staff, that’s probably not a good message to send right now to people who are not being paid,” Tillis told reporters. “I’m not an attorney, but I think it’s bad strategy to even say that sort of stuff.”

Trump’s Muddled Messaging

Prior government shutdowns garnered much more national attention than the current standoff. Part of this is because shutdowns and drama over government funding used to be rare in Washington. Nowadays, the institution is consumed with political gridlock, and it seems like the lawmakers are constantly dealing with threats of shutdown. Often, the most they can do is kick the can down the road by passing a “continuing resolution” to keep funding going at current spending levels.

In the last few weeks, however, Trump has been anything but focused on the government funding fight playing out in Washington. He’s been far more busy drawing all sorts of headlines on other fronts, including making attacks against late night TV show hosts and other nations at the United Nations General Assembly, announcing new domestic policies, launching strikes against suspected Venezuelan drug cartels, sending National Guard troops into Illinois and Oregon despite opposition from those states’ governors, and calling for Chicago’s mayor and the governor of Illinois to be jailed. On Wednesday, he’s set to hold a roundtable on antifa, a loose movement opposed to fascism.

Chicago Tribune via Getty Images

When he has addressed the situation on Capitol Hill, he has often contradicted GOP leadership, undercutting their positions by saying he is open and willing to speak to Democrats and that he’d like to pay furloughed federal workers.

Polls show most Americans don’t expect to be personally affected by the shutdown. Only 11% said they expected to be personally affected, according to a YouGov survey conducted last week. That could change as the pain of a government shutdown becomes more acute and more people are affected by airport staffing shortages. Federal workers will also begin missing paychecks on Oct. 10, and military families on Oct. 15. During the 2019 shutdown, the Pentagon was one of the few departments that was funded, which is one of the reasons it lasted so long.

“It’s a factor,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said of the coming soft deadlines. “I mean, we don’t like any of this. We just want them to fix the problem that they made that’s going to cause Virginians to have to pay so much more for health care or lose health insurance. So that’s what we’re focused on.”