Biden is AWOL as Washington spirals into shutdown chaos
Democratic lawmakers haven’t heard from the president.
By Adam Cancryn
12/19/2024 06:00 PM EST
Joe Biden may still occupy the Oval Office, but it’s clearer than ever that he’s no longer in charge of Washington.
More than a half-dozen House Democratic lawmakers said Thursday that the conference had yet to hear from the president, even as Congress scrambled to salvage a funding deal and avoid shutting down the government.
In the 24 hours since President-elect Donald Trump and close ally Elon Musk abruptly derailed the bipartisan agreement, Biden has remained conspicuously absent outside a brief statement issued by his press secretary — and for now, Democrats said there was little clamor for him to return.
“I haven’t gotten any message from President Biden, or heard of anything that he’s saying,” said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.). “Elon’s the shot-caller, it’s pretty clear to me.”
As Republicans now try to sell a revamped bill before funding runs out Friday night, the eleventh-hour debacle threatens to swamp the last days of Biden’s term, while costing the administration some final policy priorities that it had hoped to cement as part of the year-end agreement.
But as lawmakers searched for a way forward, no one seemed to be looking to Biden for answers — and the lame-duck president gave no indication he had any desire to provide them.
“I haven’t spoken to him,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the Democrats’ top appropriator, said of Biden, adding that she didn’t expect to in the near future. “I’ve spoken to the White House. I think their view is, ‘we had a deal.”
Biden aides and allies cast the president’s silence over the last day-and-a-half as a strategic decision. Trump is now poised to take the blame for any shutdown, they argued, damaging him politically even before he takes office. And they contend that anything Biden says now would risk hardening the GOP’s resolve, making it more difficult to strike a deal.
Still, the president’s absence underscores a jarring reality that officials in both parties said has become clear since the November election: While Biden technically still runs the country, Trump — and increasingly Musk — are the real captains now.
“This is ridiculous,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said of the sudden challenge of negotiating with multiple GOP leaders. “We negotiated it and they walked away from it because a shadow president billionaire, who doesn’t care where his rent check is going to come from or where his Social Security check is going to come from, suddenly decided he wants to shut down the government.”
Biden spent all of Wednesday in Wilmington, Delaware, where he attended an early morning memorial marking the death of his first wife and daughter in a car crash more than 50 years ago. By the time Trump and Musk scuttled the deal that lawmakers planned to vote on that afternoon, the White House had already called a lid, indicating Biden would not be seen or heard for the rest of the day.
The only public communication from the administration amid the scramble came in a statement several hours after the year-end bill had officially collapsed, in which press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized Republicans for reneging on the agreement.
“Republicans need to stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement or they will hurt hardworking Americans and create instability across the country,” she said. “A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”
White House staffers have since kept in close touch with Democratic Hill leaders on strategy and messaging, said one person familiar with the administration’s thinking who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. That message has effectively boiled down to highlighting the widespread cost of a government shutdown — including billions in disaster relief funding — while emphasizing that Trump and Republicans caused the crisis and are now responsible for solving it.
But as White House aides rushed to manage the fallout, Biden remained at his home in Delaware for much of Thursday, with nothing on his public schedule outside of his daily briefing. He did not address the funding talks when he returned to the White House Thursday evening.
Biden had not spoken with Speaker Mike Johnson, and top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries declined to say whether he’d connected personally with the president in the last 24 hours — allowing only that he’d been in “close contact with the administration.”
The White House declined to detail how Biden spent his day, and had no comment on the funding negotiations beyond Jean-Pierre’s initial statement.
As House Democrats emerged from a caucus meeting Thursday morning, they said there’d been no contemplation of Biden’s own views on the stalemate, with several instead pointedly referring to Musk as “President Musk” and putting it on Trump and Johnson to resolve the impasse.
“We have to let folks at home know it’s very likely that we will have a government shutdown,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas). “The clock is running and I have no idea what Johnson’s plans are. I don’t know that anybody does.”
Republicans said Thursday afternoon that they had reached an agreement, though Democratic leaders quickly panned the revised proposal. If it passes, it would avert a government shutdown over the holidays and allow the transition to proceed unimpeded. But the resolution appears to have occurred with no direct intervention from the president at all.
Since Trump won the presidency for the second time last month, some Democrats have been irritated by Biden’s low-profile approach to his final months, complaining that it’s left a leadership vacuum as the party tries to prepare for Trump’s return.
That void has been further highlighted by Trump’s all-consuming presence over the same period, with his minute-by-minute whims determining the direction of the Republican Party and the news cycle on a near-daily basis.
But at least for a couple days, as Republicans rushed to decode Trump’s funding demands, Democrats appeared largely fine with Biden taking a back seat. On Thursday, as Trump tried to push the blame for a potential shutdown toward the president, even Republicans struggled to keep up with the shifting message.
“It’s pretty obvious it is President Trump’s government at this time, and basically President Biden is no longer involved,” said Sen. John Barrasso, the chamber’s No. 2 Republican.
Members from both sides agreed on the fact that Trump was running the show — and whatever consequences come with it.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan). It’s in Republicans’ hands.”
Nicholas Wu and Eli Stokols contributed to this report.
