President Barack Obama demanded an end to a three-day government shutdown he decried as a reckless "farce," piling pressure on Republicans to climb down first on a budget impasse.
The US Treasury meanwhile warned of "catastrophic" consequences if there is no deal within weeks to raise the country's debt ceiling, and the IMF chief said navigating a way out of that sequin uggs next crisis was "mission critical."
Obama traveled to the Washington suburbs to lambast Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who emerged from a White House meeting late on Wednesday complaining that the president would not negotiate with him.
"Take a vote, stop this farce and end this shutdown right now," Obama said during a fiery speech in the Maryland suburb of Rockville, which is home to many federal workers laid off in the shutdown.
Branding the crisis a "reckless Republican shutdown," Obama said that Boehner could reopen the government and get hundreds of thousands of people back to work "in just five minutes" by passing a temporary operating budget with no partisan strings attached.