Once again, the country is on the brink of a government shutdown.
Unless the Republican-controlled Senate passes a spending bill, the government will shut down on Friday at midnight, when last year’s appropriations run out.
The House has already passed a bill to fund the government through September on a nearly complete party-line vote. The bill keeps most spending stable, but it includes boosts to defense spending and cuts to domestic projects, one-time grants, and programs like a federal rural broadband initiative. It also restricts the District of Columbia’s locally funded budget.
It faced critics on both sides of the aisle: Conservative Republicans argued the bill didn’t do enough to cut spending, and disliked the legislative method used to fund the government, while Democrats balked at the cuts. But eventually, all but one House Republican supported the party’s legislation, while all but one House Democrat opposed it.
To pass the bill in the Senate, Republicans stand to need the help of eight Senate Democrats to clear the 60-vote filibuster hurdle. The GOP holds a 53-seat majority, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has already said he will not support the plan. So far, one Senate Democrat has come out in favor: John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who said he refuses “to burn the village down in order to save it.”
The stakes are high for a few reasons. This “continuing resolution” (as it’s called in Congress) is Democrats’ first high-profile chance at a stand-off with Republicans in Donald Trump’s second term — their chance to try to negotiate for some oversight and accountability over the White House, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” and their cuts across the government. And the Democratic base is furious at its leaders; to help Republicans keep the government open would send yet another message to Democrats that their party isn’t confronting Trump the way they want them to.
But shutdowns are never popular — and the risks of forcing one are real: Designating a score of government employees as nonessential could facilitate the work of Musk and DOGE, while giving Trump a foil as his own approval ratings fall.
There’s no easy answer here. There are legitimate reasons to oppose and support the stopgap effort — and time is running out to make a choice.
The case for letting the government shut down
Democrats have plenty of reasons to oppose the Republican spending plan. And there’s a whole assortment of folks pushing them to do so, including most House Democrats, some safe-seat Senate Democrats, progressive activists, both liberal and moderate Democratic strategists, and your average resistance liberal.
Democrats preferred a 30-day stopgap spending bill so that they could have longer negotiations over cuts to government spending. But they were largely ignored as House Republicans led the effort for a six-month-long extension.
Going along with a plan they were left out of, some Democrats say, could incentivize Republicans to keep governing without the opposition party’s input in the future — which isn’t usual for government spending bills like this. Some also see the opportunity to force Republicans to make concessions in order to keep the government open at a time when they control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
Democrats wanted a spending bill that included safeguards for how government funding would be spent and administered: Namely, they wanted guarantees that the White House would spend the money Congress had appropriated, protecting the legislative branch’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse. Those concerns grew after a report from the news outlet NOTUS that Vice President JD Vance told House members to vote for the bill and suggested that Trump would refuse to spend allocations that the White House thought were harmful.
Safeguards against such spending blocks are not included in the House bill. Nor are more oversight of and limits on DOGE and Elon Musk, another Democratic priority.
Other Democrats point out that Trump is already effectively shutting down parts of the government through DOGE’s major cuts to federal agencies: Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, for example, pointed to the mass firings at the Department of Education this week as evidence that Trump and Musk “have been shutting down our government piecemeal, illegally shuttering programs, agencies, and now attempting to close entire departments.”
So the case for allowing a shutdown is also that Democrats would be taking a stand against a presidency that has already challenged legal and constitutional norms, dismantled parts of the federal government and its workforce, and, they say, poses a threat to democracy.
That’s at least the case that anti-CR Democrats, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have made: “The bill that was strongly opposed by House Democrats is a power grab that further unleashes and entrenches Elon Musk’s efforts,” Jeffries said yesterday. He and other House Democratic leaders have been urging Senate Democrats to “stand” with them and oppose the CR.
Even those wary of a shutdown are making the same case about the separation of powers: “The problem I have with the bill is that I think it advances this project that we’re seeing come from the executive branch, this power grab that does not respect that the power of the purse is with the Congress,” Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told reporters on Wednesday.
In that way, they’d not only be ideologically consistent with the case they’ve been making against Trump, Musk, and DOGE for the last two months, but also be feeding the burning appetite for obstruction and resistance that their base has been craving since Trump took office.
Shoring up Democratic support, unifying the party, and beating back the “do-nothing” Democratic brand that has taken root are all clear political benefits. And though it’s unclear now who the public would primarily blame for a shutdown, this faction argues that there’s enough time for public sentiment to recover if it ends up primarily hurting Democrats.
The case against a shutdown
More moderate and swing-state elected officials, like Fetterman, centrist commentators, and strategists are pushing against a shutdown — and Senate Democrats have been receptive to their case. They seem to be particularly wary about the economic effects on their states should the government close for an extended period. Aside from it being a basic congressional duty, there are concerns that those worried about the work DOGE is doing to downsize the federal government cut staff would be boosted by the sudden designation of federal workers into “essential” and “nonessential” categories.
Wired, for example, has explained one theory: that Musk and DOGE would welcome a shutdown since it not only makes it easier to pick which workers to fire, but could make it easier for DOGE to identify programs and agencies that can be completely folded. After 30 days of a government shutdown, the executive branch also gets larger legal abilities over how the government can operate and whether to pay back workers at all if they return from furlough.
There is also a whole mess of political risks in play if Democrats are cast as the facilitators of a government shutdown.
At the moment, Trump, Republicans, and Musk are the primary villains and main characters of the political ecosystem. Trump’s favorability and approval ratings are declining, his handling of the economy and the confusion over tariffs are the major story of the day, and the risk of a recession is all over the media.
To have Democrats trigger a shutdown would functionally be a major distraction — an own goal — in the face of Republicans’ self-engineered spiral.
Should economic conditions deteriorate quickly, and the shutdown last long, Trump could also end up spinning fallout on Democrats; the executive branch has some leeway in implementing a shutdown, so there would be plenty more opportunities to create bad news cycles for the Democrats. It’s partially why shutdowns get blamed not on the party in power, but on the party that causes them to happen; up until now, that’s been the Republicans.
That was one of the fears Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who seemed to be waffling on opposing the bill, laid out to CNN yesterday: “It does seem the lesser of two very serious evils to go along with the CR. Shutting down the government it’s always a last resort; in this case, it’s even more than that,” he said. “Who knows how long it stays shut down? Who knows how long the president decides that he likes making all the decisions for the government? You can imagine him saying, ‘Congress has failed, Congress can’t help you. It’s up to me to save everyone.’”