Talks at the White House on Monday aimed at preventing a government shutdown left both sides far apart on a deal. Earlier in the day, reports emerged that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would consider a ten-day extension of government funding if Trump agreed to negotiate on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year.
Reaction to this was swift. “You don’t pick a fight and then run away,” said Emma Lydon, managing director of P Street, the government relations arm of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Within a couple of hours, Schumer told reporters that he would not back a short-term funding agreement under any circumstances. But one bigger problem with the conversation around government funding, with less than 24 hours to the deadline, is the nature of the fight being picked.
The negotiations and debates are operating under the premise that appropriations to federal agencies are flowing today and will stop flowing tomorrow, and that this is something political leaders want to avoid. It’s hard to uncover any evidence that this is truly the case.
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The Supreme Court’s latest ruling definitively allows the Trump administration to cancel whatever funding they disfavor within 45 days of the end of the appropriation, without any approval from Congress. The administration now has power, formalized by the Court in a sleight-of-hand move by claiming nobody has standing to sue, to cut whatever they want out of the budget, at a time when they are pressuring Congress to send them a budget.
That Supreme Court ruling involved $4 billion in foreign aid funding that the administration semi-formally tried to rescind; it doesn’t include the $410 billion that the White House has simply withheld from programs across the country. That represents close to half of all outlays in the fiscal year 2025 nondefense discretionary budget, which have simply vanished, perhaps permanently after the last day of the fiscal year, which is today. The Office of Management and Budget, as Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) has explained, has offered no explanation of how money is being spent or where withheld spending is going.
About 12 percent of the federal workforce has been terminated. Last week, we heard threats from OMB director Russ Vought that a shutdown will really allow the Office of Management and Budget to fire workers. A shutdown provides no actual legal authority to fire federal employees, but then again there was no legal authority to rescind or withhold appropriated spending without congressional approval, or put workers on extended administrative leave, as they did with the unauthorized buyout back in January.
As Daniel Schuman points out, Vought presented guidance to agencies in February that they should prepare for mass layoffs by today, September 30. Any allegedly shutdown-induced “mass layoff” should be seen as the continuation of an existing plan that has been public for seven months.
The reality is that Republicans have every opportunity to fund the government if they want.
The larger point is that the government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government. Activities deemed “essential” by the president—stalking immigrants, lobbing missiles at Iran, etc.—have gone on, but activities purported to conflict with the president’s policies, regardless of whether they have been authorized by the lawmaking body of the United States, have been stopped, interrupted only by occasional federal courts telling the president that doing so is illegal, which the Supreme Court subsequently brushes aside.
The shutdown can certainly be used rhetorically to justify more firings, but they’re just the same firings with a different rationale, one that is no more legal or legitimate than before. Of course, “legal” and “legitimate” are loaded words given the rubber-stampers at the Supreme Court.
“Unfortunately, a shutdown seems very likely because nobody, not even my Republican colleagues, can trust Donald Trump,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the Prospect. “So far, Republicans refuse to sit down and have an honest negotiation.”
The individuals most knowledgeable about this slow-motion shutdown, and most forthright about what Democrats should do in the face of it, are the workers living through it. On Monday, 30,000 federal workers told House and Senate Democratic leaders that they’d rather miss out on their paychecks than see Trump further erode federal programs.
In a letter delivered Monday morning and coordinated by the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), workers implored Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the House Democratic leader, to “reject any bad deal in the name of protecting federal employees,” and said fighting Trump’s consolidation of power is paramount, even if that means shutting down the government. “A government shutdown is never Plan A. Federal workers and the communities we serve will face severe hardship. But federal workers will willingly forego paychecks in the hopes of preserving the programs we have devoted our lives to administering,” workers said in the letter.
The letter, which agreed that the government is functionally shut down, outlined the “unprecedented harms” Americans are already experiencing from Trump’s deadly funding cuts, including to Social Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and from Trump’s attacks on independent science and data, agency closures without congressional input, and the decimation of labor.
“Enough is enough. At a certain point we can’t allow continued destruction of programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on,” federal worker and labor lawyer James Kirwan told the Prospect. Kirwan said Americans want politicians who “stand up and protect them from further harm.”
Jeffries and Schumer didn’t respond to requests for comment on the letter. But Democrats, by and large, have appropriately depicted Vought’s threats as empty intimidation. Unfortunately, they are foregrounding health care cuts as the main reason for the fight, and not the fact that the government has been shut down for several months and it must be reopened, with guarantees that Trump and Vought cannot meddle to shut it down again, piece by piece.
Some members of Congress understand this imperative. Behold this quote: “If you’re a Democrat—even just like a mainstream Democrat—your predisposition might be to help negotiate with Republicans on a funding mechanism … Why would you do that if you know that whatever you negotiate is going to be subject to the knife pulled out by Russ Vought?” That didn’t come from a Democrat but from Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), a senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee.
Schuman has put this best: “There is no point for Senate Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) to negotiate or vote for a spending bill, short term or otherwise, unless it resolves or leads to the resolution the issues of impoundments and restricting further withholding of funds, reinforces GAO authority to investigate and litigate impoundments, places political shackles on Vought (such as a new Inspector General at OMB), and requires regular, accurate reporting of agency spending.”
The reality is that Republicans have every opportunity to fund the government if they want. They can do what they have done repeatedly when stymied by Democrats in the Senate from achieving their goals; they can change the Senate rules. In this case, they can end the filibuster on legislative activities like the budget and pass it with the majority they have. Democrats are not needed to lend support to a process that is so distorted and broken that the executive is telling Congress he will not honor any deal they make. If Republicans want to hand over Congress to Trump, they can do it themselves.
Vought has been waiting for four years to implement his pre-20th-century vision of supreme executive power that invests the prerogatives of government in one person. In a shutdown, the government can dictate what parts of the executive branch stay open; Vought has already been doing that. If it feels like the current fight isn’t about health care or insurance subsidies but about our system of government itself, that’s because it is.