Hope to advert government shutdown

President Obama is expected to announce today that the shutdown had been averted.

Some progress towards the adverting of the shutdown has been made on Thursday evening, when Obama had a meeting with the Republican speaker, John Boehner, and the and the Democrat Senate leader, Harry Reid. The President was optimistic at the end of the meeting, saying he is hoping the differences have been narrowed.

800,000 federal staff risk to be suspended without pay and a range of government services will be withdrawn as hundreds of agencies either continue with a reduced operation or close altogether, if a deal is not reached between the two sides.

The President said: "I have just completed another meeting with the speaker. We made some additional progress this evening. I am not prepared to express wild optimism, but I think we are further along today than we were yesterday."

Boehner and Reid confirmed Obama's statement, their joint position says some differences have been narrowed,  and their staff is still working to reach an agreement.



Reid said: "The numbers are basically there. But I'm not nearly as optimistic – and that's an understatement – as I was 11 hours ago. The numbers are extremely close. Our differences are no longer over how much savings we get on government spending. The only thing holding up an agreement is an ideology."

The Republican controlled House passed a bill that would keep the federal government going for at least another week, but the Democrat-controlled Senate is not going to pass, also President Obama is expected to veto it.

While the Republicans oped for a cut in the federal deficit of $40bn, the Democrats made a compromise offer of $34.5bn on Wednesday.

US Congress is sending warning letters to staff saying they will be suspended from this weekend. Hundreds of thousands of other workers will also be affected by the government shutdown. From this letters, people in the staff find out whether they are regarded as essential or not. The White House, the Pentagon and the federal agencies applied the same procedure with their staff. If the agreement is not reached, the government will begin stopping everything, including payments to troops in Afghanistan, Iraq.