Good evening. I'm John Yang. The battle lines are drawn for tomorrow's high-stakes

Oval Office meeting between President Trump and bipartisan congressional leaders one day

before the deadline to avert a government shutdown. Faring separately on NBC's Meet the Press,

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, each said the other would be to blame for a shutdown.

I think there are potentially a path forward. We have to see where it goes, but we can't do it while the American people are being held hostage by the Democrats in a government shutdown.

We need a serious negotiation. Now, if the president at this meeting is going to rant and just yell at Democrats and talk about all his alleged grievances and say this, that, and the other thing, we won't get anything done.

Republicans want a short-term spending bill without any other provisions, while Democrats say the price of their support is restoring Medicaid cuts and extending subsidies that help low and middle income

earners buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Adding to the uncertainty,

our administration plans to use a shutdown to fire more federal workers. Eric Katz covers

federal agencies for the online publication government executive. Eric, tell us about these plans to use

this shutdown to fire more federal workers. The White House, through its budget office, put out

guidance this past week, advising agencies that they should develop plans to, instead of having

the normal furloughs of employees that know, employees get sent home only until the

shutdown ends, they would instead be sent home permanently. They would lose their jobs.

The White House said the agencies should focus on any federal employee who's, who doesn't receive

special funding for their job. So anyone funded through the normal annual

appropriations and anyone whose work is not focused on Trump administration priorities. So

there would be certain areas that would be exempted from this. But large swathes of the federal

government would be facing potential layoffs under this shutdown.

How does this fit in with the president's goal of reshaping the federal government and making it smaller?

President Trump has been focused on shrinking the size of the federal workforce and the federal

government since he took office. Not too long after he took office, he ordered similar layoff plans from every agency.

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