Are Democrats Already Surrendering on Government Spending?

Senator Peter Welch sounds the retreat. Photo: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times/Redux

It’s a demoralizing time to be a congressional Democrat. As the Trump-Musk-Vought demolition team continues to dismantle federal government functions and fire personnel, the Republicans who control Congress are standing by passively despite the explicit and implicit threats to their own authority represented by DOGE raids, OMB-ordered freezes and layoffs, and presidential executive orders asserting total control over spending. They may whine about it (Senate Appropriations Committee chair Susan Collins has been complaining that thunderbolts from Musk aren’t the right way to downsize government), but they aren’t willing to buck Trump, who so far seems to be chuckling with pleasure at DOGE’s excesses and even egging Musk on. Meanwhile, Democrats have been excluded categorically from the formal budget process whereby Congress makes long-term fiscal plans, which are designed to be enacted in a huge package (which cannot be filibustered) via a strict party-line vote.

But Democrats in Congress have one big leverage point: Annual appropriations bills, providing the money to keep the federal government going, have to pass both chambers of Congress and can indeed be filibustered in the Senate, which means 41 of the 47 Democratic senators have the absolute power to say no. Democrats have additional leverage in the House, where the tiny GOP majority, combined with an assortment of Republican fiscal hard-liners who never vote for spending bills, means appropriations bills can’t pass without Democratic votes. As the assault on the federal government and on Congress developed in the first days of the second Trump administration, Democrats appeared to be aware of their leverage and ready to use it, as reflected in a comment by Senator Patty Murray to Punchbowl News earlier this month:

Democrats are, as always, committed to responsibly funding the government, but it is extremely difficult to reach an agreement on toplines — much less full-year spending bills — when the president is illegally blocking vast chunks of approved funding, when he is trying to unilaterally shutter critical agencies, and when an unelected billionaire is empowered to force his way into our government’s central, highly-sensitive payments system [at the Treasury Department]. Democrats and Republicans alike must be able to trust that when a deal gets signed into law, it will be followed.

With the stopgap spending authority enacted in December due to expire on March 14, now is the time for Democrats to use their leverage to refuse any deal that doesn’t include meaningful curbs on executive usurpation of congressional spending powers. Yes, if executed, this gambit could result in a government shutdown, and Republicans from Trump on down (including those who love all government shutdowns as a way to show how useless government actually is) would seek to blame it on the minority party, despite the GOP’s comprehensive, swaggering control of Washington. But at a time when Democratic constituencies are screaming from every rooftop that they expect their representatives in Washington to do something, refusing to go along with spending bills that the administration will just brush aside seems like a no-brainer.

But now that the moment of truth is approaching, there are signs some congressional Democrats are inclined to flinch in the face of a GOP-engineered choice to shut it or gut it, as Politico explains:

Democrats are insisting on the guardrails for Trump and Musk amid deep anger on the left about the president’s unilateral dismantling of the federal government. Following a meeting of top GOP appropriators and party leadership Wednesday morning, Republicans officially rejected the proposal.

Democratic leaders now face a dilemma: Do they hold firm, refrain from bailing Republicans out and allow an unpopular shutdown? Or do they fold and risk the ire of liberal voters eager to see the party stand their ground against Trump and Musk? So far, they are treading carefully.

In this case, carefully appears to be a synonym for fearfully. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sure isn’t drawing any lines in the sand:

[Jeffries] deferred to House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut when asked Wednesday whether Democrats could support a funding deal that doesn’t restrain Trump and Musk.

This is not exactly a “hell no.” More explicitly, Vermont Senator Peter Welch spelled out how Democrats might rationalize a surrender of their leverage, per Punchbowl News:

What makes us think if we put more language in there, [Musk is] gonna pay any attention to that? He’s on a lawless rampage, and there’s nothing stopping him,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) told us. “The big question will be if he faces a judicial order and disregards it.”

This is another way of just throwing up one’s hands and hoping the courts rein in the stampeding chief executive and his turbulent agents. In the meantime, presumably, Democrats can cut their little deals on spending, keep the federal government open, and hope for the best.

If that’s the way the wind is blowing among congressional Democrats, it may represent an extreme version of the belief that the voters don’t care anything about the Constitution or lawful behavior and can be mobilized only to resist Trump by extremely specific cuts in services or programs they value. But if there’s a silver lining to the vast power Elon Musk has been given by the 47th president, it’s that his indifference and even hostility to the very concept of government having any value is so blatant as to shock even the most diffident or inattentive voter. Here’s how my colleague the longtime Musk watcher John Hermann puts it:

[H]e wants to fire as many people as possible. Punishing workers is a cause and a purpose unto itself, inseparable from a grandiose conflation of personal desires and successes with the fate of humanity. It’s an ecstatic project with an accelerationist character. “I am become meme,” he declares, as his team of private-sector loyalists harasses federal employees with spiteful emails threatening to get rid of them. The message from the largest employer in the country to its disfavored employees could not be much clearer: You are waste, you are fraud. We want to make a spectacle of your misfortune. We cannot wait to fire you. 

Musk is already unpopular, and he doesn’t really care if the pain suffered by government workers or the “parasites” who depend on the benefits or services they provide make his project a political handicap for Trump and the GOP. Shining as bright a light on what DOGE is doing as possible is really the only play for the opposition party right now. If that means daring Republicans to trigger a government shutdown that MAGA folk will not be able to stop themselves from conspicuously enjoying, so be it.