Members of the U.S. Senate failed for the 11th time late Monday to end the federal government shutdown that is now entering its third week with no signs of progress toward a resolution despite shocking new evidence on a major issue at the heart of the legislative deadlock.

Sixty votes were required to approve the “cloture” vote to limit debate pending a final vote on the shutdown issue, but only 53 senators voted aye while 43 opposed it. The Senate may take a motion to reconsider the vote on Tuesday, but there is no indication of a different outcome at least for now.

The Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act is a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government through the end of November. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Senator Angus King, the Maine Independent who caucuses with Democrats, voted with Republicans on the cloture motion.

Passage of the CR would provide Congress more time to complete action by November 21 on nine outstanding major appropriations. House Republicans gained passage of the CR last month, but the Senate has gone nowhere on the issue since the shutdown began on October 1.

Complicating the Senate GOP’s efforts to secure passage of the CR is the recalcitrance of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has voted against the measure at every opportunity because he claims it continues spending levels carried over from President Joe Biden’s administration.

President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) have contended throughout the debate that the Democrats condition for supporting the CR would repeal major health care reforms approved by Congress earlier this year in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of 2025.

“Democrats’ proposal would result in nearly $200 billion spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next decade — enough to fund the entire Children’s Health Insurance Program,” according to a White House Fact Sheet issued on Day One of the shutdown.

For their part, Hill Democrats insist that illegal immigrants are not receiving federal benefits under programs like Medicaid because it is illegal, and they demand Republicans agree to repeal the OBBBA reforms, including making permanent the temporary pandemic-related Obamacare subsidies approved during President Joe Biden’s administration. Unless those temporary subsidies are made permanent, they argue, as many as 20 million Americans will soon face staggering premium increases.

Democrats in both chambers of Congress voted for the temporary subsidies when they were first approved by Congress through the American Rescue Act of 2021 and then extended to 2025 by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, both Biden administration-backed proposals. Only the subsidies that were intended to be temporary would expire, according to congress.gov, if Congress doesn’t repeal the provision as Democrats are demanding. The original Obamacare tax credit known as the Premium Tax Credit (PTC) would continue in force.

“They say the Democrats want undocumented immigrants to get the federal dollars of health care. That is utter bull, and they know it. The law prohibits undocumented immigrants from getting payments from Medicare, Medicaid, or the ACA. There is no money — not a penny of federal dollars — that are going there,” Schumer said during a September 30 exchange on the Senate floor with Thune.

But a new internal investigation mounted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) is raising serious questions about the accuracy of Schumer’s assertion that no federal tax dollars are going to provide health care to illegal immigrants.

“CMS’s findings about over a billion dollars in Medicaid benefits getting funneled to illegal immigrants represent the exact sort of waste, fraud, and abuse that the Trump administration is trying to cut — and the exact sort of waste, fraud, and abuse that Democrats want even more of by shutting down our government to give free health care to illegal immigrants,” Trump White House Spokesman Kush Desai told The Washington Stand Monday.

The “findings” Desai referenced had first been explained by CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz on October 16 in a “Fox & Friends” interview.

“Democrats have been gaslighting us on this issue of Medicaid funds going to illegals for quite a while,” Oz told Fox News. “They keep claiming there is no federal money going from Medicaid, the agency I run, to illegal immigrants, so we decided to do our homework. We sent our best investigators out to see exactly what is going on.”

It didn’t take long for the CMS investigators to find multiple examples of Medicaid money going to illegal immigrants, explaining that in “just over the last few months, we have proven that over a billion dollars, that’s with a B, that’s a lot of money, it’s not a rounding error, and it went to illegal immigrants in half a dozen states, and we’re just getting started. So, it’s going to be significantly more money.”

Tax dollars collected from residents in Texas and Florida are “being diverted to places like California” to cover the costs of providing Medicaid benefits to illegal immigrants, he said.

“Now we’re investigating this and we’re going to continue to track it across the country,” Oz said.

The Washington Stand asked spokesmen for Schumer and Jeffries for comment on the CMS findings, but no response was received by publication time for this story.