WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday the administration is looking for ways to get a handful of additional U.S. Senate Democrats to vote for Republicans’ stopgap spending bill to reopen government.

But, in the meantime, White House officials plan to lay off federal workers en masse, a dramatic and unsettling step that’s not traditionally been taken during past shutdowns.

“We’re going to have to take extraordinary measures to ensure the people’s government operates — again not perfectly because it’s not going to operate perfectly in the midst of a shutdown — but operates as well as it possibly can,” Vance said.

Any Democrats concerned about the impacts of layoffs on federal programs or people’s lives, Vance said, should vote to advance a seven-week stopgap spending bill th

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