Congress
GOP’s latest shutdown offer includes possible reversal of some mass firings
Republicans made a new offer to Senate Democrats Thursday in hopes of cutting a deal that would end the 37-day government shutdown and advance a package of three full-year spending bills, according to four people granted anonymity to disclose the private discussions.
The new offer arrived just ahead of a crucial closed-door lunch where Democratic senators will discuss the path forward. Republicans have thrown a new sweetener in the mix, according to two of the people — that they are willing to discuss rehiring federal workers who have been laid off during the shutdown as part of a deal to end it.
Democrats have pressed for weeks to make President Donald Trump’s “reductions in force” part of a shutdown-ending deal. What exactly the rehiring terms would be is undecided, but the two people said it was now part of the negotiations.
The package of appropriations legislation would include the Agriculture-FDA, Military Construction-VA and Legislative Branch funding bills, according to three of the people.
Getting a deal on the full-year bills wouldn’t be enough to reopen the government. But it would be a key step forward because lawmakers are expected to attach the stopgap spending bill that would reopen the government to the full-year package.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Thursday that Republicans had made Democrats an offer but did not detail what it included.
The offer from Republicans does not address the date of the stopgap bill, which is subject to internal debate among Republicans, or Democrats’ main point of contention — the soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who has been a key negotiator, told reporters on Thursday morning that “we need to make sure that federal employees who have been RIFed are able to come back to work.”
Bipartisan negotiations have been underway for months on the three funding measures Senate leaders are hoping to advance. After the Senate passed its own versions of the bills in August, top appropriators began bicameral negotiations on final bills that could pass both chambers.
If Congress clears the proposed package, funding for the affected departments and programs — including the crucial Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — would be guaranteed through next September. An attached spending patch would end the shutdown but fund the rest of the government at current levels for only a few more months.
Jennifer Scholtes, Meredith Lee Hill and Joe Gould contributed to this report.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Monday for immediate congressional action to regulate artificial intelligence — his most urgent call to date for guardrails on the rapidly advancing technology amid warnings it could eradicate humanity if left unchecked.
“The explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the challenges that are therein presented — that’s not a hoax,” Jeffries said at his weekly news conference. “It’s very real, despite what Donald Trump has to say about that issue as well, and it requires decisive congressional action immediately, in a manner consistent with what some of the leading AI voices in the country are now saying needs to happen, as it relates to slowing things down to protect the health, the safety and the well-being of the American people.”
Jeffries’ call for regulation comes days after an ex-Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, warned that AI could “kill us all,” prompting calls from the company’s CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk for an AI development slowdown. Trump has responded by downplaying the risks and doubling down in his support for accelerating AI breakthroughs to compete with China.
Jeffries urged Speaker Mike Johnson Monday to keep Congress in session “until something is done decisively to protect the safety and the well-being of the American people, in the face of growing concerns being raised by experts within the artificial intelligence industry itself.”
Johnson canceled the last two weeks of session before the midterms, meaning that the House is slated to leave Capitol Hill on Thursday and not return until Nov. 9. The speaker has given no indication he will revisit this plan and has remained noncommittal on whether the chamber will consider AI safety legislation ahead of the elections, if at all.
Jeffries also said the Democrat-only AI commission he convened this Congress could begin rolling out its policy recommendations soon, noting he plans to meet with the group’s three co-chairs this week. And he blamed Johnson for declining to reconstitute a bipartisan AI task force that would have allowed members of both parties to work together on the issue.
“We want to ensure that American entrepreneurs and companies can continue to lead in this space and not be overcome by the Chinese Communist Party,” Jeffries said of what the Democratic-led commission has been working on. “But on the other hand, we’ve got to ensure that the American people actually experience the benefits of artificial intelligence without being subjected to the very real, and very grave and very dangerous downsides.”
But while Jeffries is positioning Democrats as leaders on AI policy — now and in the next Congress — he declined to endorse a proposal from some of his colleagues to create a select AI committee if the party wins the majority in November.
“We’re focused on the substance, not the process,” he said, adding that any select committee discussions would take place after election day.
Jeffries did endorse the Ratepayer Protection Act — a bipartisan bill intended to shield Americans from energy costs associated with the data center boom — which is slated for a vote Tuesday.
“It’s a step forward,” he said. “More clearly needs to be done.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday he sees a role for Congress in regulating artificial intelligence — albeit with a “light touch.”
Thune’s comments, made to reporters in the Capitol as President Donald Trump publicly railed against regulating frontier AI models, are the first he’s made since industry insiders sounded alarm bells about the technology’s potentially catastrophic impacts on humanity.
“It needs to strike a balance, light touch. You don’t want to stifle innovation, but I think you also want to make sure that the more advanced threats can be mitigated, and there’s a capability in place to do that,” Thune said.
He added that he believed Congress could put “guardrails around those types of more consequential threats without in any way harming our ability to stay ahead in the AI race.”
Thune introduced an AI safety bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in 2023 and is negotiating a revised version that he said Monday “reflects the approach” he is advocating. Thune said he spoke with Klobuchar over the weekend about the revised bill, which is also being negotiated with Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and expressed hopes it would be finalized “hopefully soon” and that they can “get a path forward for it.”
Cruz previously told Blue Light News that he could hold a committee vote on AI legislation before the chamber adjourns ahead of the midterm elections — perhaps as soon as the end of next week.
OpenAI’s top lobbyist is on Capitol Hill Monday to meet with lawmakers as anxieties about artificial intelligence abound throughout the country.
The company’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, plans to sit down with a bipartisan mix of members of the House and Senate — including those in leadership, a company spokesperson told Blue Light News.
The visit comes days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in calling for the AI industry to slow the pace of developing the rapidly evolving technology, after an ex-researcher with Anthropic warned AI left unchecked could potentially cause human extinction in a matter of years. The comments have ignited a firestorm of debate about the role of government in setting guardrails around the technology.
Lehane has separately been pushing for state AI safety laws that the industry finds palatable in places like California, Illinois and New York. Congress, meanwhile, has failed to take substantive action. He published a blog post last week about the need for new policies at the state and federal level as the technology’s capabilities has “reached a new chapter.”
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