The US government shutdown entered its second week on Monday, with no sign of a deal between President Donald Trump’s Republicans and Democrats to end the crisis.Democrats are refusing to provide the handful of votes the ruling Republicans need to reopen federal departments, unless an agreement is reached on extending expiring “Obamacare” health care subsidies and reversing some cuts to health programs passed as part of Trump’s signature “One Big Beautiful Bill.”With the government out of money since Wednesday and grinding to a halt, Senate Democrats looked set to vote against a House-passed temporary funding bill for a fifth time.The hard line taken by Democrats marks a rare moment of leverage for the opposition party in a period when Trump and his ultra-loyal Republicans control every branch of government and Trump himself is accused of seeking to amass authoritarian-like powers.With funding not renewed, non-critical services are being suspended.Salaries for hundreds of thousands of public sector employees are set to be withheld from Friday, while military personnel could miss their paychecks from October 15.And Trump has upped the ante by threatening to have large numbers of government employees fired, rather than just furloughed — placed on temporary unpaid leave status — as is normally done during shutdowns.The president said Sunday that workers were already being fired, but White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt walked back the comments a day later, saying he was only “referring to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have been furloughed.”Republicans are digging in their heels, with House Speaker Mike Johnson telling his members not even to report to Congress unless the Democrats cave, insisting any health care negotiation be held after re-opening the government.”If he’s serious about lowering costs and protecting the health care of the American people, why wait?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a challenge to Johnson on Monday.”Democrats are ready to do it now,” he wrote on X.- Shutdown impacts -The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which he signed into law on July 4, would strip 11 million Americans of health care coverage, mainly through cuts to the Medicaid program for low-income families. That figure would be in addition to the four million Americans Democrats say will lose health care next year if Obamacare health insurance subsidies are not extended — while another 24 million Americans will see their premiums double.Republicans argue the expiring health care subsidies have nothing to do with keeping the government open and can be dealt with separately before the end of the year.As the shutdown begins to bite, the Environmental Protection Agency, space agency NASA and the Education, Commerce and Labor departments have been the hardest hit by staff being furloughed — or placed on enforced leave — during the shutdown.  The Transport, Justice, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs Departments are among those that have seen the least effects so far, the contingency plans of each organization show.With members of Congress at home and no formal talks taking place in either chamber, a CBS News poll released Sunday showed the public blaming Republicans by a narrow margin for the gridlock. Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said Sunday layoffs would begin “if the president decides that the negotiations are absolutely going nowhere.” Trump has already sent a steamroller through government since taking office for his second term in January.Spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, 200,000 jobs had already been cut from the federal workforce before the shutdown, according to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

The Democratic-led US state of Illinois filed suit on Monday to block President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago.The lawsuit comes one day after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the Republican president from sending soldiers to the state’s biggest city, Portland, as part of his crackdown on crime and undocumented migrants.Trump over the weekend authorized the deployment of 700 National Guard soldiers to Chicago despite the opposition of elected Democratic leaders including the mayor and Governor JB Pritzker.In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Illinois, the state Attorney General Kwame Raoul and counsel for Chicago accused Trump of using US troops “to punish his political enemies.””The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” they said.”Far from promoting public safety in the Chicago region,” they wrote, Trump’s “provocative and arbitrary actions have threatened to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry.””Illinois asks this Court to declare these actions unlawful and enjoin them, immediately as well as permanently,” they added.Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended the plan to send troops to Chicago, claiming that the third-largest US city is “a war zone.”Pritzker, responding on CNN, accused Republicans of seeking to “create the war zone, so that they can send in even more troops.”A CBS poll released Sunday found that 58 percent of Americans oppose deploying the National Guard to US cities.But Trump, who spoke last week of using the military for a “war from within,” shows no sign of backing down.On Sunday he claimed, falsely, that “Portland is burning to the ground. It’s insurrectionists all over the place.”- ‘Constitutional law, not martial law’ -Trump’s campaign to use the military on home soil hit a roadblock Saturday in Portland when a federal court ruled the deployment was unlawful.Trump has repeatedly called Portland “war-ravaged,” but District Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary block on troop deployment, saying “the president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.””This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote Immergut, a Trump appointee.Although Portland has seen scattered attacks on federal officers and property, the administration failed to demonstrate “that those episodes of violence were part of an organized attempt to overthrow the government as a whole,” she said.The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.”With all due respect to that judge, I think her opinion is untethered in reality and in the law,” Leavitt said. “We’re very confident in the president’s legal authority to do this.””The president wants to ensure that our federal buildings and our assets are protected and that’s exactly what he’s trying to do,” she said.Days of tense scenes in Chicago turned violent on Saturday when a federal officer shot a motorist that the Department of Homeland Security said had been armed and rammed one of their vehicles.Illinois and Oregon are not the first states to file legal challenges against the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard.California filed suit after Trump sent troops to Los Angeles earlier this year to quell protests sparked by a crackdown on undocumented migrants.A district court judge ruled it unlawful but the deployment was upheld by an appeals court panel.