As talks to strike a bipartisan funding deal withered last week, a spending extension to October seemed like Speaker Mike Johnson’s clearest path to avert a government shutdown. Democrats say not so fast.
Although lawmakers swear stopgap spending patches aren’t their preferred method of funding the government, at this point, the matter has become a fair question. Johnson and other leaders have repeatedly used continuing resolutions in place of forcing members on the House Appropriations Committee to find agreements, and the lesson from these standoffs, year after year, is that there is almost always enough votes to pass a CR.
Johnson now insists that another CR is the lone way to prevent a shutdown — only he wants this one to go for the rest of the fiscal year.
Stretching the current funding deal to the end of the fiscal year in October would give Republicans the legislative bandwidth to focus on budget reconciliation, while also giving appropriators time to sort through the sticky issue of how to handle Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s agency cuts.
Democrats are demanding assurances in any spending bill that the Trump administration can’t unilaterally rescind congressionally directed spending. Republicans want to give the president the authority to do just that.
With that issue seemingly unresolvable at the moment — both parties look destined to let the courts decide the question — GOP leaders think their best bet is yet another CR, this time, for the rest of the fiscal year.
For now, the Trump administration is backing the idea, despite routine conservative angst about funding the government through continuing resolutions. Administration officials are even meeting with Freedom Caucus holdouts at the White House on Wednesday.
With just 10 days until a shutdown, Johnson’s path of least resistance is finding plenty of pushback, particularly from Democrats.
“It’s detrimental,” the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, told reporters on Tuesday. “It really hurts.”
“I believe in the power and the strength of the Appropriations Committee,” she said. “We have the power of the purse. The president doesn’t have it.”
DeLauro also said Tuesday that Democrats would vote against a CR for the rest of the fiscal year, raising the prospect that a shutdown might be coming.
Neither party is looking to cause a shutdown, leaders all maintain. But with Democrats and conservatives raging against the CR plan, Johnson is confronting the reality that the votes might not be there to stop one.
Democrats pose perhaps the greatest threat to Johnson. Republicans know there are a few dozen in their ranks who are reflexively opposed to CRs, and with a paper-thin majority, Republicans can only afford to lose one vote if Democrats all oppose the bill.
Faced with this math problem many times before, Johnson has leaned on Democrats to solve the equation — jumping in at the last moment to deliver key votes.
But this time, House Democratic leaders are incensed, blaming Republicans for icing them out of talks. If Republicans won’t deign to give them a seat at the negotiating table — where they were seeking assurances that Trump will use congressionally approved funds for their intended purposes — Democrats aren’t going to cough up their votes on the floor.
“House Republicans are marching toward a government shutdown that was started by Elon Musk,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Tuesday.
Democrats struck a similar tone in December, when Musk bashed a bipartisan spending deal at the last minute. Without a hand in the legislation, Democrats claimed they were prepared to withhold their votes and let funding expire.
In the end, they folded. Jeffries handed Johnson unanimous support from Democrats, averting a holiday shutdown.
But many Democrats still harbor grudges over that December showdown. And they’re not eager to go along with another last-minute Johnson proposal. After all, in December, it was Joe Biden in the White House who would have absorbed the blame of a shutdown in the final days of his presidency. Now, it’s Trump.
The top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, Rep. Jim McGovern, said Democrats would not back down until Republicans resume negotiations in good faith.
“They run around telling everybody they have this big mandate,” McGovern told NOTUS. “Well, then put your mandate pants on and pass whatever you want to pass.”
“But if you want to work with us,” he continued, “then you ought to sit down and talk and work with us, not just float scenarios out there and expect us to respond in a serious way.”
Democratic Rep. Sean Casten also said assurances that Trump would use funds for their appropriated purpose were a deal-breaker for Democrats.
“My general feeling is that, if you had a kid who wasn’t doing any chores and kept raiding your liquor cabinet, and said, ‘Why didn’t you give me my allowance this week?’ That’s the conversation,” Casten told NOTUS.
“If we don’t have a commitment by the House that, when the executive branch fails to obey the laws of the United States, there will be consequences of oversight, then it would be irresponsible for us to give them a blank check,” Casten said.
Republican leadership appears to be betting that Democrats will cave, chalking up their posturing to partisan bluster. Still, they’ve enlisted the White House to work on plan B: passing a Republican-only bill.
That prospect is difficult to imagine, if only because so many Republicans have so many different issues with another CR.
Rep. Tim Burchett, who starts from an automatic position of “no” on CRs, said he’s attending the White House meeting on Wednesday, and that he hopes to hear a clear message: “less spending.”
Burchett said that even though he’s considering backing a clean CR, “until I see something in writing I like, I’m not going to commit.”
Part of Burchett’s opposition — and the opposition from other conservatives — is over so-called “anomalies” attached to the continuing resolution. Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole told reporters Tuesday that he is planning to make the bill as politically palatable as possible, adding only a few essential “anomalies” to make the legislation a straightforward extension.
“We’re going to write a CR that is as non-objectionable to every quarter as we can make it, whether you’re in the Freedom Caucus or you’re in the Democratic Caucus,” Cole told reporters. “We’re not trying to put poison pills in. We’re not trying to hide anything. We’re not trying to fool you. I just — I don’t want to give you an excuse to vote no.”
Rep. Ralph Norman — who is also set to attend the meeting and historically opposes CRs — told NOTUS his assessment of conservative attitudes toward the CR was: “Are there people who are concerned? Yes. Are they saying they’re noes? Yes.”
But even if the White House and Republican leadership can persuade those uncomfortable with another CR to swallow one more in the name of the Trump agenda, Johnson will have to answer to GOP lawmakers desperate to return to a regular appropriations process.
“As an appropriator, I follow Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution,” Rep. Ryan Zinke told NOTUS. “I think we should appropriate, and a CR has some downsides.”
Zinke, like many other Republicans, is reflexively resistant to support any CR, though he also left himself room to ultimately side with Trump and the rest of the GOP conference.
“I don’t like CRs,” Zinke said. “I hate CRs, and the longer the CR, the more I hate it.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Reese Gorman, Daniella Diaz and Em Luetkemeyer, who are reporters at NOTUS, contributed to this report.