President meets congressional leaders the day before the shutdown deadline; the Vice President says afterward that a shutdown is likely.

The federal government’s funding under the most recent continuing resolution was scheduled to lapse at midnight on Tuesday, September 30, 2025. The customary instrument for averting a lapse is a new continuing resolution, agreed by leadership of the House and Senate, signed by the President. The instrument is, by long standing, the responsibility of all four leaders together with the executive.

On Monday afternoon, September 29, the President met with the House Speaker, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority Leader, and the Senate Minority Leader in the Roosevelt Room. The meeting was the first multi-leader meeting on the shutdown calendar. It came twenty-eight hours before the funding lapse.

The substantive disagreement was, by reported account, over the inclusion of provisions extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that were scheduled to expire on December 31. The Democratic leadership was insisting on inclusion. The Republican leadership and the President were insisting on exclusion. The exchange in the Roosevelt Room ran approximately ninety minutes. No agreement was reached. No press availability was held jointly.

The Vice President, exiting the meeting, was asked by reporters in the West Wing driveway whether a shutdown was likely. The Vice President answered: I think it’s likely. The exchange was on camera. It was a candid characterization, by the second-ranking executive officer, of the probable failure of a negotiation in which his office had just participated. It was not a leak. It was a statement.

In the same evening, separately, the President met with Prime Minister Netanyahu and announced a 20-point plan for the resolution of the war in Gaza. The two events, the shutdown meeting and the Gaza plan, were the second and third items on the President’s calendar. The Gaza plan was the more substantive announcement of the day. The shutdown meeting was, by Tuesday morning’s coverage, the more visible.

The structural matter is the architecture. A shutdown is, in mechanical terms, a failure of negotiation between two coequal branches of government. The negotiation, when functioning, takes place in the weeks preceding the deadline. When the negotiation does not function, the meeting in the Roosevelt Room twenty-eight hours before the deadline is, in effect, a press event. The press event in this case produced a Vice-Presidential admission that the press event had not produced an agreement.

A serious country’s executive branch does not rely on a Monday-afternoon meeting twenty-eight hours before the lapse to produce the first multi-leader negotiating session on a continuing resolution. A serious country, in the September of every year, has a draft on the Senate floor by Labor Day. The draft, this year, was not drafted by Labor Day. The draft, this year, was not drafted by Monday afternoon. The draft, by Tuesday at midnight, was not drafted at all.

Calmly documenting the decline.