Democrats May Shut Down Government to Keep Trump From Gutting It

Democrats like Patty Murray are mulling a more radical posture on a potential government shutdown. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

You can put the whole Trump 2.0 “shock and awe” agenda of right-wing policies into two baskets. There are things that Donald Trump pretty clearly has the power to do (e.g., tariffs and revoking policies set by Biden executive orders) or a Republican-controlled Congress can do via the upcoming budget reconciliation bill (or bills) that Democrats cannot stop. And then there are things Trump and his underlings are doing that rely on exotic and dangerous theories of imperial presidential powers that Richard Nixon could have only dreamed of possessing. These include the Office of Management and Budget’s aborted “federal funding freeze” and the guerrilla campaign that Elon Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps is undertaking by physically seizing control of “choke points” for government operations. Democrats obviously can’t do anything about those executive actions, other than to point and shout and encourage the courts to intervene.

But there is a steadily increasing possibility that the Trump offensive could go so far and so fast that congressional Democrats are tempted essentially to go on strike when it comes to actions where they do actually have some leverage. These include an upcoming effort to keep the federal government operating when the stopgap spending authority enacted in December runs out on March 14. And Democrats will also probably have to lend some support to the debt-limit increase Trump has demanded, which will need to happen by late spring (Republicans could include that in their party-line budget reconciliation legislation, but extreme hostility from House Freedom Caucus types makes that improbable).

Would the “party of government” really defend that government by threatening to defund it or even risk a debt default? There’s already talk about extreme measures, as Senator Patty Murray told Punchbowl News:

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.

A Democratic staffer put it more starkly in the same story: “We could get to a tipping point where bipartisan cooperation becomes an overwhelming negative for us.”

So the emerging idea may be for congressional Democrats to insist that before they provide a single vote that Republicans need, Elon Musk and Russell Vought (the OMB director nominee widely thought to be behind the funding freeze) must be put on a leash. It’s possible that by doing so, they could be empowering people within the administration who are either terrified or threatened by the vast power grabs represented by both Musk’s shadowy DOGE operation and Vought’s ambitions to make OMB the all-powerful “central nervous system” of the entire federal budget. They are potentially even aligning themselves with MAGA “populists” for whom extreme austerity measures are an annoying hangover from pre-Trump conservatism. And presumably congressional Republicans, despite their silence about or complicity in the Musk-Vought shenanigans, have some misgivings about being made completely superfluous in terms of spending decisions and policy priorities.

A Democratic hard line on any appropriations deal could put Republicans generally in a bind, if only because fiscal hard-liners in the House are already ratcheting up their demands for deep budget cuts to secure their own votes, as Politico reports:

House Republican leaders want committees to land deeper spending cuts in their party-line bill to enact President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, as they scramble to address a rebellion from key Budget Committee members who think Speaker Mike Johnson’s initial plan falls short.

Key hard-liners and others on the Budget panel are pushing to outline at least $1 trillion in spending cuts in the blueprint that the committee is supposed to debate this week, according to three people familiar with the private discussions who were granted anonymity to describe them.

At a minimum, congressional Democrats need to make it immediately clear that they will use their leverage, even if that means a government shutdown. But at some point, they need to decide if they will use that leverage to secure concessions on the details of spending levels, or instead go big with an attack on lawless expansions of executive powers. Some Democrats may be inclined to let the courts police the kind of wild conduct associated with DOGE and to gamble that the U.S. Supreme Court will put a stop to Vought’s ambitions for unlimited presidential power to “impound” congressionally appropriated dollars as some sort of personal embodiment of the popular or divine will. But if the chaotic events of the last week are just an appetizer for outrages to come, Democrats may conclude that functioning as an opposition party requires putting themselves in the path of the Trump 2.0 locomotive and yelling, “STOP!”