Democrats Are Serious About A Shutdown

When President Donald Trump announced last week he wanted Congress to “pass a clean, temporary government funding Bill,” that should have dropped the chances of a federal shutdown to near zero.

After all, shutdown threats tend to get driven by conservative hard-liners intent on cutting spending — and who better than Trump to pull them in line and keep the government open?

So it’s quite a testament to how dramatically Trump has shaken up Washington over the past six weeks that the likelihood of a shutdown hasn’t abated. In fact, according to my reporting, it might actually have increased.

This time, it’s Democrats who are itching for a fight — over the Department of Government Efficiency cuts that Trump has blessed and deputized mogul Elon Musk has gleefully carried out.

Senior House Democrats have spent recent days privately surveying their members about whether they’d be willing to shut the government down over DOGE cuts, according to multiple well-placed Democratic sources I spoke to over the weekend.

So far, they’re encountering little resistance.

Democrats of all persuasions, even some centrists who have long been firmly anti-shutdown, feel that voting for a “clean” spending bill would be tacitly blessing Musk’s controversial work. Denying Republicans the votes they’ll need to keep the agencies open, they believe, would be the lesser evil.

“Nobody wants a shutdown, but they don’t feel like aiding and abetting what’s happening, with Musk and Trump taking a wrecking ball to health care in particular,” said one senior House Democratic aide, who like others I spoke to was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal party conversations. “Why would we be complicit in that?”

A senior Democratic lawmaker was blunter: “At some point you’ve got to have a goddamn backbone. I am not giving them a blank check until September.”

That’s a big pivot from just a few weeks ago. In early February, I pooh-poohed the left’s push to use the March 14 government funding deadline to make a stand against Musk — and then heard from a number of senior Democratic officials on both sides of the Capitol who privately agreed with my assessment.

A Democrat-induced shutdown, they agreed, would backfire on their party politically and only empower Musk even more to slash and burn his way through federal agencies. And they were frustrated with the base for not seeming to understand that playing with fire wasn’t the answer.

Now, with the funding deadline less than two weeks away?

“People now feel like the more perilous position is giving votes without the perception there's been any change in accountability,” a second senior House Democratic aide told me. “The incentive structure right now is not to provide votes for them.”

Sure, you can chalk some of the shift up to negotiating tactics. Democrats want Republicans to put some policy handcuffs on Musk, something Republicans are firmly rejecting. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole called it “a non-starter and battle they lost to the American people” on Monday.

And Democratic leaders have every reason to amp up pressure on their GOP counterparts to deliver as many votes as possible, given their control of the House, Senate and White House. No reason to make it easy on them, even if there’s no real shutdown threat, right?

But that’s not how House Democrats are talking, even in private. During a recent meeting between Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his committee leaders, top appropriator Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut steamed about how Speaker Mike Johnson was going to try to make them swallow the clean funding extension.

“No fucking way!” she shouted, a person in the room told me. Jeffries didn’t push back, and now his leadership team is gauging whether his members are willing to take this fight all the way.

Usually shutdown saber-rattling originates on the fringes of the two parties and gains momentum until leaders just can’t ignore it, lest they risk their own jobs. This time, however, the foment is coming from the leadership table itself — where there is growing anger over the lightning-fast Trump-Musk campaign to gut federal agencies and the glacial pace of court action to stop it.

Some senior House Democrats believe the impacts of the DOGE cuts have already created a shutdown of sorts and that passing a clean funding extension would effectively green-light the status quo and potentially undercut pending court cases challenging Trump and Musk.

Moreover, I am told, Democrats have been emboldened by recent polling showing that the public has started to shift against DOGE, as Americans hear more about potentially losing benefits and veterans getting kicked out of jobs. That’s to say nothing of the recent town-hall protests, where Republican lawmakers took an earful from constituents raging against DOGE.

Perhaps most importantly, Democrats up and down the leadership chain are hearing not only from the liberal base but people they consider more mainstream — donors, strategists and constituents who believe they need to show some fight, and fast.

“It's very hard to go back to those people and say, ‘Yeah, I voted for the status quo here and did nothing to stand up,’” the second House Democratic aide said.

What might be even harder for House Democrats, though, is figuring out an endgame.

Say Democrats vote against a clean spending bill in the House and allow a shutdown to occur: Musk might have dismissed tens of thousands of federal workers, but Uncle Sam still employs more than 2 million more who would be furloughed without pay.

Amid the finger-pointing, Republicans would call vote after vote to reopen government agencies — casting Democrats as the ones who are repeatedly choosing to keep agencies shut and employees home without paychecks.

That’s tough terrain to fight from, politically speaking, and especially tough when you consider how a shutdown might undercut Democrats’ core message right now — that Trump and Musk are undercutting the services and benefits that millions of Americans rely on.

Right now, senior party leaders are posturing, trying to cast Republicans as the unreasonable ones. “The only one who wants a shutdown right now is Elon Musk," Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray of Washington said Monday, calling for a “short-term” stopgap instead of the six-month bill Trump and Johnson want.

Jeffries over the weekend accused GOP leaders of “walking away” from funding talks, arguing that it’s on the GOP alone to fund the government since they control everything.

Top Democrats know as well as anyone that’s not exactly true: Appropriations has to be bipartisan given the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, which is the leverage they have long used to counter Republicans’ proposed spending cuts. And that argument isn’t the kind of resonant message that’s capable of ultimately winning over the public.

But it turns out Democrats might have learned a lesson from the most recent GOP-instigated shutdowns — the multi-week affairs seen in 2013 and 2019 waged over health care and border policy, respectively: Winning isn’t always the point — sometimes, when dealing with an angry base, you just have to tilt at the windmill.