SAN FRANCISCO — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a sharp critique of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday, suggesting he had forfeited a crucial bargaining chip by allowing a vote on Republicans’ government funding bill.
“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi told reporters during a news conference at a children’s hospital in San Francisco. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”
Pelosi — who spoke during an event to oppose House Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid — said she still supports Schumer, her longtime ally who’s come under fire from within his own party in recent days over his decision to allow the GOP’s bill to avert a government shutdown through last Friday.
But Pelosi, in response to a question, suggested that if Schumer hadn’t cleared the way, it would have given Democrats more leverage to fight proposed cuts to Medicaid and other social safety-net programs.
“We could have, in my view, perhaps, gotten them to agree to a third way,” Pelosi said. She said a potential outcome could have been a bipartisan continuing resolution to delay a shutdown for up to four weeks while negotiations continued.
She added, “They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they’re not agreeing to it — and that then they would have been shutting (the) government down.”
It’s the second time in a week that Pelosi has criticized Schumer over his handling of the funding bill. On Friday, she suggested his move had played into a “false choice” that President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk had offered Congress: shutdown the government or give them a “blank check” to slash government spending.
Pelosi also praised House Democrats and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, her successor, for refusing to support Republicans’ stopgap spending measure, despite blowback from Trump’s administration and GOP leaders, who accused Democrats of risking a shutdown for political reasons.
Tensions between Schumer and Jeffries blew up last week after the Senate Democrat bucked his party’s move in the House. But the two have played nice in recent days, and Jeffries said Tuesday that he supports Schumer’s leadership.
Later Tuesday Pelosi noted her and Jeffries’ shared confidence in Schumer — and she was quick to suggest Democrats are poised to recapture the House in the midterm 2026 elections amid a “drumbeat” of protests over proposed cuts to Medicaid and other public programs.
“What happened last week was last week,” Pelosi said. “We’re going into the future.”
