Operating with a skeleton crew of staffers thanks to the government shutdown the White House announced on Thursday night that President Barack Obama would be cancelling a trip to Southeast Asia to attend economic and security summits, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The White House had previously said that they were planning on shortening the trip by cancelling two visits to the Philippines and Malaysia, two of the four countries President Obama originally planned on visiting.
"The cancellation of this trip is another consequence of the House Republicans forcing a shutdown of the government," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. "This completely avoidable shutdown is setting back our ability to create jobs through promotion of U.S. exports and advance U.S. leadership and interests in the largest emerging region in the world."
Secretary of State John Kerry will be making the trip instead while President Obama stays in Washington and tries to find a solution to the government shutdown that was in its fourth day, according to U.S. News & World Report.
"From a symbolic standpoint at least, the cancellation of the trip is very damaging to American diplomacy," Shi Yinhong, a professor at Beijing's Renmin University, told the Los Angeles Times. "Until now, the U.S. has been very successful diplomatically in Southeast Asia, while China has been strong only economically and financially."
With much of the White House's staff on furlough, officially 1,265 of the 1,701 assigned to the Executive Office of the President were deemed non-essential, the staffers who remain are having to perform duties they never have in the past. High ranking employees are finding themselves doing the chores that were normally left to the most junior members, such as clearing visitors to the Oval Office and sending out press statements, according to the New York Times.
With only one person left working from the president's advance team, the group that sets up logistics for White House events, all events are running late now that the well-oiled machine that is often in the background is no longer setting things up, the New York Times reports.
