How Democrats Can Win This Shutdown Fight
The party may be out of power, but it is not powerless. Here are a few suggestions for what to do about government funding.
WITH NO CONSTITUTIONAL POLICE TO ENFORCE our nation’s basic laws, the most practical check on a tyrannical president is Congress’s power of the purse. And for the last couple of weeks, as the March 14 deadline for passing a government funding bill approaches, congressional Democrats have been moving toward asserting that power.
Republicans need Democratic votes to pass a government-wide appropriations bill for the 2025 fiscal year. Democrats have countered—and rightly so—that there’s no point in giving the president a new budget if he continues to defy the current one. They’ve made clear they will help only with guarantees that Elon Musk and DOGE’s lawless impoundment of congressionally approved funding will end, and that every penny Congress provides will be spent as Congress directs.
So what happens next?
The Republican fallback position, since they won’t stand up to Trump and Musk, has been to give up on a new funding bill, and to propose a long-term continuing resolution (or “CR”) instead. This would fund the government at current levels and with existing congressional mandates through the end of September.
A CR could be seen as a small victory for Democrats. It would force Trump to live with a Biden approved budget, and prevent Republicans from changing spending levels or imposing their ideological vision for the rest of the year. And the alternative is to let the government shut down.
But here is the problem: Large parts of the government are being shut down anyway, by Trump and Musk, without the consent of Congress. So a continuing resolution would only protect those parts of the government that Trump and Musk want to keep. It would fund multiple programs that are not in fact continuing.
For example, the CR will provide more than $40 billion to USAID for public health, nutrition, and support for democracy around the world. Sounds great! But USAID has been reduced to a shell, its grants mostly terminated, its staff mostly fired. The CR will give $79 billion to the Department of Education, which the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate, $9 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency, which its new administrator, Lee Zeldin, plans to shrink by two-thirds, $47 billion to the National Institutes of Health, though much of its funding for research on diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s has been frozen, and $684 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, though its headquarters has been shuttered.
And so on, and so on.
The dilemma for Democrats who will be asked to vote for a continuing resolution is that this continuing resolution will be a lie—like sending tuition money to a child who has dropped out of school. Barring further judicial or congressional intervention, the power of the purse will largely have been transferred from Congress to the billionaire and his pet president.
So what choices do Democrats have?
One option would be to swallow a CR to the end of the fiscal year. An argument for this would be that maintaining government funding on paper would help the plaintiffs who are trying to persuade judges to unfreeze the funds Trump and Musk have already frozen. But Congress should not rely entirely on the courts to save the day. While the Supreme Court did rule this week that USAID must honor its agreements with several humanitarian organizations, it was only to pay them for contracted work they had already done. Even then, four Justices dissented from this narrow decision. Who knows how the Supreme Court will rule when the pivotal questions surrounding impoundment come before it.
A better option for Democrats would be to agree to a much shorter CR—say, a month. That would allow Democrats to assess how the court battles are playing out and to keep negotiating a government funding bill with guardrails to ensure Trump actually abides by it.
As for those guardrails, there are several approaches that Democratic appropriators have likely thought about. The most obvious would be to restate and even strengthen the provisions of the current Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to seek timely congressional approval if he doesn’t want to spend funds that Congress has approved for some program or purpose. But the administration is already disobeying this law, which it considers unconstitutional, and congressional Republicans have thus far rejected any language that places additional requirements on the president.
I would suggest another approach, one that would empower Congress without forcing Trump to do anything new—requiring the comptroller general of the United States (a nonpartisan official appointed by Congress) to make monthly reports detailing any recent presidential impoundments of congressionally appropriated funds.
This would be powerful because under current law, such reports by the comptroller trigger a mandatory congressional vote, and an impoundment is considered legal only if both the House and Senate approve it. Making them monthly would thus force the Republicans to take regular votes on Trump’s refusal to spend funds on everything from cancer research to Meals on Wheels to implementing the CHIPS Act.
Finally, Democrats have a nuclear option—to refuse to pass a CR, and allow the government to shut down until the Republicans agree to such safeguards. They could exercise it now, or after another short term funding extension, if nothing else seems to be working.
Whatever strategy Democrats choose, they need to understand that the fight they’re in is different from any fight they’ve experienced in the past. It’s not yet clear that all of them do. So far, the Democrats’ mantra has been that Trump and Musk are trying to cut Medicaid and other government programs to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. That’s true, and it’s a potent argument. But it’s also the argument Democrats always use against Republicans. It makes the unprecedented crisis we’re in seem normal.
In fact, Trump, Musk, and the ideologues around them are not primarily interested in cutting spending (like their authoritarian role models from Russia to Hungary, they’d likely be happy to see government checks from big social programs keep flowing). What they are interested in is power. They want to eliminate or downsize every part of the government that is dominated by nonpartisan civil servants who work for the people, rather than for a particular president. Their legislative agenda is to break the legislative branch, to reduce Congress to the status of an advisory body. And if no one stops them from impounding lawfully appropriated funds, that’s what Congress will become.
The American people will pay a terrible price for the destruction of our government’s talent and capacity and from the shredding of our Constitution. Perhaps the pain we will suffer will cause more of us to vote for Democrats in two years. But the country can’t afford to wait that long. The fight must be joined next week.
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