White House Tells House GOP to Get Serious on Shutdown: ‘It Is Not on Us to Fix’

The White House is making one thing clear as the government is set to run out of money this weekend: It’s up to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — not President Joe Biden — to avert a shutdown.

As McCarthy tries to shift blame to Biden over the current impasse on government spending, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that his focus should be on the "extreme" members of the House Republican caucus, who have yet to unite around a measure to keep the government funded.

“It's not on us to fix,” she said. “It's not on this president to fix. It is on Congress to fix.”

Current federal funding for government operations expires at 12:01 a.m. ET Sunday, leaving little time for lawmakers to find a compromise to keep the government running. Though carryover funds are expected to keep agencies running without impact for a time in some instances, a shutdown will ultimately lead to furloughs of federal workers and a lapse of government services.

That means more than 2 million service members who show up to work won’t be seeing their paychecks and about 700,000 civilian employees will be sent home on furlough while about 800,000 others will work without pay, said Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget. While federal employees are expected to be paid retroactively during shutdowns, the lapses still lead to financial stress on families.

“We're doing everything we can to plead, beg, shame House Republicans – ‘do the right thing, don't have this happen,’” Young said.

Both the House and Senate were working on competing stopgap measures to keep the government open as longer-term negotiations continue, but the House resolution -- which Biden pledged to veto -- failed Friday afternoon. McCarthy, facing far-right opposition, has said he doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate's bipartisan proposal, which the White House supports.

White House aides argue McCarthy – unlike House Democrats and senators from both parties –  is turning his back on a bipartisan budget agreement to avert a U.S. default that the parties signed off on in May. The deal, which Biden signed into law, would result in $1 trillion of deficit reduction over the next decade.

“They are on an island entirely by themselves and entirely of their own making,” Young said of the House Republicans. “Their chaos, and their chaos alone, is now threatening to push us into a shutdown.”

Jean-Pierre said she did not know when Biden and McCarthy last spoke, but she said Young and the White House Office of Legislative Affairs has been in touch regularly with congressional leaders for the last several months. “The reason why we're not negotiating is because we already did that,” she said.

She said Biden will be in Washington, D.C. over the next several days and Americans will hear from him “on a regular basis.”

“We believe that House Republicans can fix this,” she said. “It is their job to fix this.”

In a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, McCarthy touted the House already doing “what many in the media said was impossible” by voting to fund more than 70% of government spending. He was referring to the four full-year spending bills that the House has passed so far. “To date, the Senate has done zero,” he added.

The White House responded, “So close! The government actually needs to be funded 100% to stay open. Hope this helps.”

Lindsey McPherson contributed to this story.