Earlier this week, I offered some ideas on what a No Kings Budget could look like, highlighting the ability of Congress to defend itself and the American system of coequal branches of government from the Trump power grab through its appropriations powers. Democrats, armed with some leverage by virtue of having the pivotal votes for government funding, could demand the restoration of Congress relative to the presidency, particularly by ensuring that any budget deal made in a bipartisan fashion cannot be rejected, ignored, neglected, or violated by Russ Vought and Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats released their proposed continuing resolution to fund the government for one month, and it packs a lot of demands into it. Yes, the major changes are on health care, where Democrats proposed spending something like $67 billion a year on measures that would prevent seven million Americans from losing their insurance coverage, including a permanent extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies and the wiping out of all Medicaid cuts from the reconciliation bill of earlier this year. But they’ve also internalized the idea that giving money to Trump without assurances that he will spend it is worthless, and they unveiled a few creative ideas to ensure that their prerogatives will be met.
As a fact sheet from the Senate Appropriations Committee explains, the proposal prevents Vought’s “pocket rescission” gambit. Vought sent a rescission message to Congress asking to not spend around $5 billion in foreign aid. The rules of rescission give the White House 45 days to hold back the funding to see whether Congress agrees to the request; if Congress does not, the funds must be spent. But Vought sent the message 34 days before the end of the fiscal year; the idea is that if Republicans in Congress just sat on it, the spending would vanish without congressional approval.
A federal judge has already found this illegal, but Trump’s personal legal bailout specialist Chief Justice John Roberts allowed the administration to withhold the funds until the legal battle played out. Section 118 of the Democratic proposal is pretty clever: It extends the availability of the foreign-aid funds past September 30, getting to the full 45 days that, if they expired or if Congress rejected the recission, would force Vought to spend the money.
Section 118 would also affect National Institutes of Health research funding, part of a series of funds that Vought has illegally withheld. That money would vanish on September 30 as well, but the proposal extends availability as court fights continue with the intention of forcing the money out.
Democrats have internalized the idea that giving money to Trump without assurances that he will spend it is worthless.
Beyond 2025, Section 119 of the bill turns off, permanently, the “fast-track” procedures for a rescission of funds under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. These procedures allow rescissions to be handled with 50 votes, even though a budget requires 60 votes in the Senate. The proposal ensures that Republicans can’t make a deal with Democrats on spending and then go it alone by cutting some of that spending thereafter. Vought would not be able to send any rescission messages in the final 90 days of a fiscal year as well, under this proposal.
The one rescission that passed Congress is partially dealt with as well, as the proposal restores funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for fiscal year 2026 (Section 154), at a cost of $491 million.
As for illegal impoundments, Section 111 of the proposal prevents any program reductions or eliminations asked for in the president’s budget request through the duration of the continuing resolution. If this provision had been in place in January, the winding down of the U.S. Agency for International Development would have been prohibited.
Section 143 adds an inspector general for Vought’s Office of Management and Budget, as Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) argued for in the Prospect this week. It’s quite incredible that an agency with immeasurable power on government spending has no internal watchdog.
Finally, Section 116 is quite interesting. In the 2023 budget deal to prevent a debt default, Congress designated some money as “emergency spending” to essentially get around budget caps. Conservatives didn’t like that deal, and earlier this year Trump unilaterally withheld $2.9 billion of that emergency spending by saying it wasn’t connected to an emergency. Most of this was foreign-aid spending.
You can argue that this was a gimmick, but it’s harder to say that Trump should have the power to cancel money appropriated by Congress. And they only canceled some of the money they didn’t like, not all of the emergency spending. So in Section 116, the Democrats reverse that action and amend the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 to remove the president from the designation of emergency spending entirely.
Does this include everything at the Democrats’ disposal to ensure that budget money they vote for is spent? Not entirely. I would have given Congress more power to nullify the designation of national emergencies (a bill that’s bipartisan); I would have defunded National Guard deployments; I might have bolstered whistleblower protections; and I would definitely have stripped jurisdiction from the Supreme Court to oversee anything in this bill, or defunded the ability for the White House to litigate over it.
But on the core question of giving actual meaning to the budget being advanced, Democrats definitely make it harder for Trump to back out of a deal and cancel appropriated spending, while returning to incidents where Trump did that in the past so they can be rectified. It’s not a bad start at all.
And it presages more creativity in the future. For example, Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) yesterday introduced a bill instructing that any money put toward the renaming of the Department of Defense as the Department of War should come out of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget. This is the kind of “hit them where it hurts” aggression that could be applied to the president as well if he continues to attack the power of the purse.
Republicans aren’t going to happily adopt these ideas wholesale. The House is planning to introduce a seven-week continuing resolution with no guarantees on spending. They expect to pass it along party lines and then send it to the Senate, daring Democrats to reject it on the eve of a government shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has called the Democratic proposal “hostage-taking,” showing that there’s a real discomfort in the GOP with the unusual spectacle of their opponents playing hardball. This is of course a negotiating position, but Republicans are refusing to negotiate.
By introducing this counteroffer, the Senate Democratic leadership is showing at least some resolve to reject a short-term continuing resolution. I don’t know that all the rank and file will agree—Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is a clear vote for the continuing resolution—but enough probably will on the first go-round to filibuster the bill.
After that, we enter the political back-and-forth of a shutdown, which is more likely than not at this point. It’s good that Democrats appear to understand the stakes for the future of Congress as a viable branch of government. In public, they’re still putting that behind the health care changes they want, but this is a pretty strong series of No Kings measures on paper. It bodes well for the potential of winning back Congress next year, and the kinds of things they might demand.