In October 2013, during the administration of President Barack Obama, the United States government underwent a budget impasse that led to a shutdown, resulting in most routine government operations being curtailed for the first seventeen days of the month. The shutdown occurred because neither legislation appropriating funds for fiscal year 2014 nor a continuing resolution for interim appropriations was approved in time, largely due to Republican attempts to tie government funding to resolutions delaying or defunding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly known as “Obamacare”).
The U.S. government experienced another shutdown in January 2018, during the administration of President Donald Trump. Republicans blamed Democrats for creating the budget impasse by holding out on fixing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, while Democrats blamed Republicans for a failure to govern and President Trump for reneging on earlier agreements:
Ever since Trump announced in September that he would end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on March 5 unless Congress acted to extend it, Democrats in the House and Senate have been clamoring for a permanent legislative fix to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers.
Prospects for a quick agreement brightened briefly in September after Trump appeared to sign off on a framework with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer; that plan would have traded the Dream Act for additional security at the border. But under pressure from immigration hard-liners, Trump backed away and added a whole new set of demands for a DACA deal, including funding for his border wall and significant changes to the legal immigration system.
Pelosi promised immigration activists that Democrats would not leave for the year without addressing DACA, but Senate Democrats agreed just before Christmas to punt the fight to January. With the funding deadline approaching and no immigration agreement in sight, Democrats in both the House and Senate decided to make a stand.
Democrats in turn blamed Republicans and Trump for a basic failure to govern, noting that this shutdown is the first in history to occur when a single party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House. And they blamed Trump for repeatedly backing out of agreements that would have resolved the dispute.
Donald Trump (then a private citizen) was highly critical of President Obama in over the 2013 government shutdown, and President Trump’s critics gleefully turned the table on him in January 2018 by casting his own words back at him:
“A shutdown falls on the President’s lack of leadership. He can’t even control his party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the President is weak”
-Donald Trump 2013#TrumpShutdown #GOPshutdown #shutdown #governmentshutdown #
— Hector Torres (@Torreshl76) January 20, 2018
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-criticize-obama-shutdown/