Senate Democrats appear poised to vote for a spending bill they hate to avoid a worse fate: Allowing a government shutdown that could enable President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to make deeper cuts to federal agencies.
The announcement late Thursday by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would support the House GOP’s seven-month stopgap measure was an acknowledgment that Democrats have little choice if they want to avoid empowering Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to unilaterally halt more federal programs under the cover of a shutdown.
“The Democrats have A or B: Keep the government open or yield the authority to the president,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a Trump ally who speaks frequently with White House officials, said in an interview.
In a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday night announcing he would support the House-passed stopgap, Schumer said he had little choice as the Friday shutdown deadline loomed.
“Musk has already said he wants a shutdown, and public reporting has shown he is already making plans to expedite his destruction of key government programs and services,” said Schumer. “A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country.”
The White House would not telegraph its shutdown plans, including whether it would unilaterally halt federal programs and furlough workers. Nor would it detail the work DOGE could undertake if most of the federal government were non-operational.
But on Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers were saying the quiet part out loud: By opposing the GOP’s funding plan in protest of Trump’s dismantling of government, Democrats would, in fact, be helping his cause.
“We’re cutting employees right now, because we’re trying to save costs,” Mullin continued. “And if the Democrats are going to play a game and shut it down — and then yield the power to him — it’ll be really easy for them to lift up the hood, look at all the essential and non-essential employees. Seems like to me it plays in their favor.”
Punctuating that threat, Musk on Wednesday night responded on X with a thinking-face emoji to a suggestion from another social media user that furloughed workers should not be brought back on the government payroll after a shutdown.
Handing Trump the power to decide what parts of the federal government are essential has been high on the list of risks Senate Democrats have been weighing. They essentially face a lose-lose choice between letting federal funding lapse and advancing a funding bill that cuts non-defense programs by about $13 billion while giving Trump leeway to shift federal money.
Both outcomes are the opposite of what Democrats tried to achieve during weeks of bipartisan funding negotiations, where they fought unsuccessfully for language to block Trump from halting spending Congress already approved and firing tens of thousands of federal workers.
Now Democratic senators worry that Trump and Musk could use a shutdown to fire more government employees, including military veterans, and shutter some agencies indefinitely.
At one point during a closed-door lunch meeting Thursday, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York warned her colleagues of “serious harm” if federal funding were to lapse and that “this will not be a normal shutdown” — raising her voice so loud that her comments were audible outside the room.
“We could see more veterans lose their jobs. We could see government departments that never open up again. So that’s a bad option,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) on Thursday.
Kelly has said he plans to oppose the stopgap bill, however, and it remained unclear Thursday night whether enough Democrats would join Schumer to support a procedural vote necessary to move onto final passage of the legislation. With Schumer and Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania committed to voting “yes,” Republicans need six more Democrats to seal the deal — Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, has long said he’ll vote “no.”
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have argued it would be Democrats who risked further stressing the federal workforce under a shutdown scenario.
Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, a member of Republican leadership, said Thursday that a government shutdown would “obviously” be a “clear moment to declare who’s essential and non-essential, and that’s a moment right now in the middle of the DOGE conversations.”
“Federal workers are going through a lot right now. There’s a lot of challenge for them, a lot of stress for them. Democrats are literally adding more to it,” Lankford said in an interview. “Not being pejorative, but one of the things I’ve said to my colleagues: ‘Do you really want to do this right now to federal workers and their families?’”
One former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to share their insights, said that using a shutdown to accomplish the administration’s bureaucracy-slashing goals was a “crazy” strategy but one that could not entirely be ruled out.
The person said the White House could be “very comfortable” during a shutdown, which would give broad latitude to Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and his budget director, Russ Vought, to make unilateral decisions about spending.
“It’s going to prove their point, if you only have essential employees and things work fine,” the former official said. “You could have a painless shutdown and prove a metaphorical point that we need less government.”
Republicans have been preparing to lay blame for a potential shutdown at Democrats’ feet. Trump himself insisted to reporters Thursday that a shutdown would not be Republicans’ fault, especially after he personally lobbied members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus to vote to keep federal programs afloat.
“People were amazed that the Republicans were able to vote in unison like that, so strongly,” Trump said.
A White House official had declined earlier in the day on Thursday to offer any further specifics on the possibility of a shutdown, how the administration would handle it and what it would mean for DOGE’s ongoing work, beyond the president’s remarks.
But past examples hinted at the authority the administration believes it has during a shutdown. As budget director during Trump’s first term, Vought played a key role steering the administration through a 35-day partial shutdown in 2019 sparked by a fight over border wall funding. During that shutdown, federal agencies used creative approaches to mitigate some of the public backlash.
Some of those strategies were later found to have been illegal: After the Interior Department diverted money from visitor fees to pay for operations at National Parks during the shutdown, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office issued a legal opinion concluding that the Trump administration move violated federal laws.
OMB also at that time allowed agencies to perform certain duties they would not normally be allowed to execute under a shutdown scenario. The budget office, for instance, allowed the IRS to recall staff to prepare and process tax returns and later permitted the agency to resume paying tax refunds. The Agriculture Department continued to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and the Fish and Wildlife Service called back furloughed staff to clean up wildlife refuges.
Former Trump White House officials point to that shutdown to demonstrate the broad purview OMB has over spending during a federal funding lapse and how it can work to make the experience as painless or painful as possible — depending on what is most helpful for the administration in power.
One unanswered question is just how aggressive a second-term Trump administration could be during a shutdown in further shrinking the federal bureaucracy. William Hoagland, who spent several decades working on the Senate Budget Committee and advising Republicans on budget matters, said lawmakers were right to fret about what might happen.
“The administration is breaking a lot of china,” he said, “and doing a lot of things that are unprecedented.”
Lisa Kashinsky, Rachael Bade and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
