Congress ignores looming shutdown to focus on tax cuts, agency layoffs

With President Donald Trump and GOP leaders distracted by other issues, Congress is on the verge of bungling its way into a shutdown of federal agencies in less than three weeks.

Trump and his advisers, particularly Elon Musk, have devoted the first month in office to trying to rip apart federal agencies that they don’t like while also upending traditional foreign policy alliances. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have battled over how fast to move all of Trump’s agenda, including at least $4.5 trillion in tax cuts at a time when the national debt is ballooning.

But those issues are likely to take months to fully negotiate and navigate through complex procedures. The most pressing problem — keeping the federal government open past the March 14 deadline — has been virtually ignored by top leaders.

And unlike the most recent shutdown deadlines, the politics of the moment are not aligned to bring the two parties together with an obvious last-minute deal that simply adds more money for each side’s favored projects.

Instead, many Democrats have grown so livid about Trump and Musk’s dismantling of agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development — ignoring laws approved by Congress and signed by previous presidents — that many Democrats say they will oppose a new round of government funding without guarantees that Trump and Musk will abide by these laws.

In outlining what they are seeking, Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, summed it up thus on Thursday: “Simply an assurance that, if there’s going to be Democratic votes, that the president and Elon Musk will follow the law and they won’t just take our bill that we worked really hard on and rip it up.”

Republicans know that without any Democratic votes, the government will shut down. To boot, at least a half dozen anti-government conservatives in the House, sometimes several dozen, refuse to vote for even the most basic bill funding the government.

Johnson’s historically narrow majority affords him just one defection to pass something with only Republican votes.

“Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House. It is their responsibility to find the votes to pass the final measures,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking minority-party member of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post on Friday.

DeLauro labeled Musk “an unchecked billionaire” whose actions have turned this negotiation from a relatively easy one to “not normal times” with a high degree of risk.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who spent 28 years climbing the Appropriations Committee ladder to finally secure the chair’s gavel last month, summed up the dire state of play.

“I believe we’re at impasse. We’ve made four good-faith offers,” Collins told reporters in the Capitol, adding that the Democrats have not made a real counteroffer. “We’ve received only a perfunctory response.”

The divide is epitomized by a pair of collegial committee members who usually forge deals but instead are now casting blame.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) noted that there is general agreement on funding levels that mirror a deal worked out in 2023. Republicans are willing to divvy up agency funds at those levels even though the leaders who negotiated that pact — Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy — are no longer in office.

“If the Democrats want to do a shutdown, they can do it by simply refusing to move forward,” Rounds said.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) grew livid at the suggestion that Democrats are blocking a deal.

“Look, the Trump administration is already shutting the government down,” Coons said.

In recent years, he oversaw funding dedicated to USAID and other foreign aid programs, Coons said. “It has specific and concrete language that says you cannot restructure USAID without congressional approval. They just did it. They just did it. So this is not hypothetical. It is not hyperbole. It is a completely understandable concern.”

The Democrats are demanding an agreement written into the package to require Trump to abide by these spending bill outlines. That is the sort of thing that resides above the pay grade of the House and Senate Appropriations Committee leaders.

Those types of “riders,” as they are known by insiders, require negotiations among Thune, Johnson and their Democratic counterparts, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York), as well as the administration.

But Trump is not paying close attention to insider machinations on Capitol Hill. Johnson and Thune’s spat has gone on for almost three months now, over one or two bills using the fast-track route to pass legislation on party-line votes.

Each time Trump has seemed to force a path — like his social media posts Wednesday morning supporting Johnson’s one “big, beautiful bill” — he contradicts the decision soon after. (Early Wednesday afternoon, Vice President JD Vance met with GOP senators and gave them the green light to continue their two-bill approach.)

Trump has spent more personal time trying to negotiate a truce to professional golf’s civil war — including a three-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday that included Tiger Woods — than he has dedicated to trying to hammer out a deal to keep the government funded.

Thune devoted the past week to the Senate passage of a budget resolution that is a first step on the way toward increased border and defense spending. If successful that way, Thune would come back later in the year to pass another GOP-only bill including tax cuts.

Johnson is aiming in the coming weeks to pass the House’s budget resolution, trying to wrap all of the GOP’s priorities into one massive bill.

Even if he succeeds, Johnson’s plan would then instruct committees to spend a few months pulling together all the legislation before returning to the House floor to consider the massive package.

None of those actions would do anything to avert the shutdown iceberg that is dead ahead.

All of this could have been handled in December, at the end of Biden’s presidency, as the appropriators had a rough spending outline ready to divide up more than $1.7 trillion in agency budgets.

But Johnson, fearing a revolt from the far-right flank, ordered up a punt on the funding bills until March 14 so that he could secure enough votes on Jan. 3 for another term as speaker.

Murray has not been shy about sending out warning flares that a real deadline is fast approaching.

“I would urge my Republican colleagues to get serious and keep your eye on the ball regarding the funding lapse on March 14,” she said during a Feb. 12 Senate Budget Committee hearing on Thune’s budget proposal.

Some congressional insiders fear that a prolonged shutdown is something that Musk and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought — whose roots come from working for the most far-right House Republicans — would cheer on. Musk, an unelected adviser with vast power, has so far not worried about the consequences of mass firings of workers in charge of air safety and those administering crucial foreign aid abroad.

And this shutdown could be much more painful than the nearly five-week version during Trump’s first term that started in late 2018. That shutdown partially shuttered some federal agencies, although critical entities, such as the Pentagon, already had their annual budgets approved and remained open.

This year, a mid-March shutdown would leave every agency without funding, keeping only those employees deemed essential at their posts. Even those key federal workers still at their jobs, such as Border Patrol agents and military troops stationed abroad, would be working without pay.

Collins, who voted to convict Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial, indicated she opposes the Democratic bid to write binding language into the spending bills.

“When bills like this are done, the rule in the past has been no poison pills, no new riders,” she told reporters.

Coons doesn’t even know how Democrats would write such a guarantee into legislation, given that it is already the law.

“I mean, it is demonstrably the law that when we pass an appropriations bill, and the president signs it into law, it has the force of law,” he said. “And you’re supposed to follow it.”