Right around noon today the Outpost spoke via phone with Rep. Jared Huffman — calling from Washington, D.C. — about the looming prospect of a federal government shutdown, which appears increasingly likely after President-elect Donald J. Trump denounced a stopgap spending bill, leaving Republicans without a strategy to fund the government.

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson had managed to strike a bipartisan deal to keep the government running temporarily, but Trump publicly denounced the agreement after billionaire Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and Trump’s pick to run a new non-government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency — “spread misinformation about the deal and vowed political retribution against any lawmaker who supported it,” according to the New York Times.

The government will shut down this weekend if a deal is not reached. 

Here’s our interview with Rep. Huffman, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

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LoCO: Hi, Congressman Huffman. How are you?

Huffman: Well, it’s a frustrating day today in Washington. 

Yeah, what’s the latest?

We were supposed to be voting on a bipartisan government funding deal that was worked out this week, and the goalposts have moved thanks to Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Yeah, I was reading about Elon Musk tweeting a lot of misinformation about the deal yesterday. Is it your understanding that [those tweets] are what scuttled the deal?

Yeah. I mean, it was a combination of Musk and Trump, and you have all these feckless House Republicans who definitely value the demands of these two billionaires more than their oath of office.

If a deal is not struck by this weekend, can you talk about what effects that might have on on your constituents here on the North Coast?

Well, it’s serious, and unfortunately, I’ve lived through it twice before, so I have a pretty good idea. You’re going to be impacted in a whole bunch of different government services. Active duty military will cease to be paid. Veterans will have their benefits delayed, their claims with the VA [U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs] and other things are going to grind to a halt. 

Federal agencies are finalizing plans right now to begin shutting things down, and so some of our public lands may cease to be accessible to the public; trash will pile up in parks; and basic sanitation and maintenance and things like that will cease to happen.

Do you have any indication of how there might be a path forward to reach a solution, or is it your prediction that this is going to indeed be a shutdown?

The obvious path forward is to put the deal that we reached, the bipartisan deal, up to a vote. It would pass, and this would quickly be over. So I’m hoping that after flirting with this terrible idea of a government shutdown, the grownups in the Republican caucus will realize this and bring that vote up.

You say it would pass, but Speaker Mike Johnson is in a position where the majority of his party has indicated that they are going to follow along with Trump’s wishes. You believe it would indeed pass if it was put to a vote today?

Yeah, it would, because Democrats would honor the deal. … We hold a majority in the Senate, and we hold enough votes in the House that, together with a few dozen Republicans, we could do it.

Do you have any hope that Speaker Johnson will call for a vote?

You know, it depends on whether he values his obligation to govern more than his political desire to hold the speaker’s gavel. That’s what this is all about. He’s in a pretty delicate position right now, because doing the right thing and funding the government may cost him his speakership.

Do you have any sense of whether he’s prepared to take such a stand?

It would be a rare profile in courage but, you know, hope springs eternal.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers and your constituents to know about the situation?

Just that I’m going to try to provide real-time updates on how the how any potential government shutdown could affect them, and my offices will stay open to help constituents with problems caused by a government shutdown. We’ve done this before. We work all the way through, and hopefully we’ll get the lights back on if this happens as quickly as possible.