The U.S. federal government will last at least into Friday after the Senate paused budget talks to accommodate Yom Kippur.
The government shut down at midnight Wednesday night amid a standoff between Democratic and Republican senators over competing spending bills. Talks to end the shutdown, the first since the record-breaking 35-day freeze in 2018, immediately paused for two days for the Jewish holiday, which begins Wednesday evening and ends Thursday evening.
The break has made senators — not to mention the 750,000 federal employees whose paychecks are in limbo — acutely aware of the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is Judaism’s holiest day.
“We’re not going to be working Thursday because it’s a Jewish holiday, but we’re planning on, right now, having votes on Friday and maybe Saturday, probably Saturday, maybe Sunday,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, told NBC News. “A lot of that is determined by how many people we have here.”
“The idea is to not vote over Yom Kippur and then come back in,” said Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming. “We’ll continue to vote.”
The shutdown hinges on Democrats’ demands to include health care funding in the spending bill, which President Donald Trump and Republican senators have said they are open to negotiating only at a later date.
“IT’S MIDNIGHT. That means the Republican shutdown has just begun because they wouldn’t protect Americans’ health care,” wrote Jewish New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer in a post on X. ‘We’re going to keep fighting for the American people.”
Federal institutions do not immediately close when the government shuts down. But they can close if a shutdown extends for a significant period. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., announced on Wednesday that it would remain open through at least Sunday.
For some watching the Senate’s budget jousting, the meaning of Yom Kippur, Judaism’s day of atonement, is resonant in the current moment.
“Yom Kippur reminds us that renewal begins with teshuvah — owning our failures and choosing a better path,” wrote one user on X. “A government shutdown on this sacred day might just be a call for our leaders to learn the same lesson.”
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