Why A Shutdown Isn’t The Leverage Some Democrats Think It Is

With President Donald Trump and Elon Musk taking a sledgehammer to the federal bureaucracy with their “Department of Government Efficiency,” Democrats are desperate to push back — and some are eyeing what they see as an irresistible piece of leverage.

Asked on “Meet the Press” Sunday if he was “prepared to shut down the government” when funding expires on March 14, Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said he was: “They are simply trying to dismantle the government,” he said. “I cannot support efforts that will continue this lawlessness that we’re seeing.”

The logic is straightforward enough: Republicans, after all, will need Democratic votes to keep the government open, given the Senate’s 60-vote threshold and House conservatives’ aversion to supporting any funding bill. Why not play a little hardball, the thinking goes, and try to get Trump and Musk to back off?

But having covered more than a few of these shutdown fights, I can say confidently that this isn’t the leverage point Democrats and much of Washington seem to think it is. Not only is this a battle Democrats probably can’t win, it’s one that could play right into Trump and Musk’s hands.

To understand why, let’s unpack the practical and political ramifications of a DOGE-focused shutdown over Musk’s efforts.

On the first, there’s a real question about whether a Trump shutdown would look anything like the government shutdowns we’ve come to know over the past four decades.

The legal basis for the modern federal shutdown traces back to a 1980 memorandum penned for President Jimmy Carter by then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. It spelled out his interpretation of what a lapse in funding would mean for a federal agency: No spending whatsoever “except as necessary to bring about the orderly termination of an agency’s functions.” He later amended that to exempt functions connected to “the safety of human life or the protection of property.”

In other words, a government bureaucrat created the shutdown, and a government bureaucrat could destroy it. Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, might not even need to rescind Civiletti’s guidance: The White House Office of Management and Budget exercises huge influence in determining what activities are essential under the memo and which aren’t.

And if we know anything about Trump’s newly confirmed OMB director, Russ Vought, it’s that he has little regard for the niceties of bureaucratic precedent. It’s not hard to imagine him working with Trump and even Musk to designate a much broader swath of favored agencies to continue operating while other, disfavored corners of government are shut down and their workers sent home.

A DOGE shutdown, in other words, could hand carte blanche to Musk, Vought & Co. to remake the federal government in the very same ways that Democrats want to fight against. In some ways, it could be even easier, in fact — a veritable dream for them.

And then there’s the politics. On the Republican side, let’s just say there isn’t very strong evidence that the MAGA wing of the party really thinks the GOP would pay much of a political price for a shutdown. Trump, after all, led the charge for the longest government shutdown in history in late 2018. His polling took a temporary hit, but it quickly recovered.

It’s Democrats who would face real political complications in embracing a shutdown fight. And there are many.

For one, Democrats would be embracing a tactic they’ve long shunned: holding the government hostage until they get what they want. The party has never been comfortable with that, and there’s little reason to think Democratic leaders would feel confident about doing so now.

There’s also the challenging message of explaining to Americans that you’re shutting the government down in order to save the government. The argument might make sense here in Washington, but it’s pretty damn confusing for every other American. And Democrats know that, in a shutdown, the winning message wins the fight.

What’s more, don’t forget that Trump and Republicans occupy the political high ground at the moment. The unfortunate reality for Democrats is that after a three-week stretch where Trump and Musk essentially shut down U.S. foreign aid, staged a hostile takeover of the federal workforce and allowed a cadre of young tech bros to access sensitive Treasury Department payments information, Trump still has a whopping 53 percent approval rating.

In fact, the same CBS poll found that 68 percent of voters thought the Trump administration is doing the “right amount” or even “not enough” spending cuts; only 32 percent said “too much.” And despite beaucoup negative coverage about Musk and his potential conflicts of interests, a slim majority of Americans think Musk — yes, an unelected foreign-born billionaire — should have “a lot” or “some” influence on government operations and spending.

Recent polling aside, there’s another truism of shutdown fights that should weigh on Democrats as they think through their strategy: Typically, it’s the party making the policy demand that sparks the shutdown that ultimately gets the blame.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer knows this all too well: When he and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi threatened to use government funding as leverage to win protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. and to halt border wall construction back in 2018, they backed down in a matter of days.

Perhaps that’s why Schumer, in a “Dear Colleague” letter to his colleagues Monday, said Democrats want to work on a bipartisan basis to keep the government open. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also hasn’t shown himself to be especially interested in picking a shutdown fight. In a letter of his own Monday, he instead announced a “Rapid Response Task Force” that would take on Trump and Musk.

“I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” Jeffries said last week when asked about using a shutdown to stop Trump and Musk. “They control the House, the Senate. And the presidency. It’s their government. What leverage do we have?”

One thing many senior Democrats privately acknowledge: positioning themselves against Trump’s crusade against “waste, fraud, and abuse” — however haphazard and destructive it might be — is not terrific ground to fight from.

The challenge for Jeffries and Schumer right now is that their members are getting lit up by a Democratic base that wants to see some fight — something, anything.

Lawmakers are so far channeling those frustrations into angry letters, tone-deaf protests and cable-news hits that look awfully feckless as the DOGE buzzsaw rips through agency after agency. No wonder they aren’t feeling excited about striking a spending deal with a Republican Party and a president who believe they can simply refuse to honor it.

What’s a lot harder to explain is that there isn’t one neat trick to push back on Trump and Musk’s crusade — that winning this fight will involve a much longer slog to turn the tide of public opinion against the GOP, and that while Democrats can hope the courts slow things down enough to prevent too much lasting damage, a shutdown fight could instead make that damage worse.

So expect senior Democrats to try to rein in the shutdown talk this week by reinforcing several points. Expect them to stress, as Jeffries did last week, that Republicans are in charge right now and that it’s their responsibility to deliver for Americans. In other words: If things go awry, it’s on the GOP.

And you can expect them to focus on the repercussions of Trump and Musk’s cuts rather than on the cuts themselves while also trying to pose the question: Are they really delivering on what Trump ran on?

There was, after all, a silver lining for Democrats in that otherwise cloudy CBS poll: Nearly half of Americans, 47 percent, said prices have continued going up since Trump became president, while only 3 percent said they’d gone down. Lowering costs for Americans was Trump’s central pitch to voters, and he’s shown relatively little attention to it since becoming president while pushing forward with policies — like blanket tariffs and pricey tax cuts — that could ultimately make it worse.

As Schumer wrote Monday: “Through a relentless messaging push, we are exposing how their policies will drive up everyday expenses, strip essential protections, and prioritize the wealthy over working Americans.”

It’s hard to see how a shutdown fits into that.