Donald Trump’s second presidency will take a novel path this week as he turns to Congress to enshrine part of his effort to transform the country — after weeks of wielding vast and questionable executive power.
House Republicans hope to vote on a bill to extend federal funding until the end of September. If they succeed, after dropping talks with Democrats on a bipartisan measure, they’ll trigger a showdown in the Senate that could end in a damaging government shutdown.
Democrats will then have to decide whether they’ll oppose the measure by mounting a filibuster. If they block it, they will risk taking the blame for shutting down the government unless they can convince the public it’s Trump’s fault. If they allow the measure to pass, they could again look like they lack the strength and purpose to resist Trump’s presidency.
The drama ahead of Friday’s funding deadline could have a serious impact on the lives and well-being of millions of Americans. A shutdown could force essential government workers to go without pay and see many more furloughed. It would disrupt services including airport security, border crossings and national parks. It would deepen the turmoil sparked by Trump’s return to the Oval Office as his brinksmanship on tariffs rocks the economy and Elon Musk’s indiscriminate shredding of the federal government causes chaos.
And Trump only heightened this uncertainty when he declined to rule out the possibility of a recession this year in an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” Vowing to go forward with his trade war policies, Trump dismissed a slide in the stock markets, which are usually one of his favorite measures of economic performance.
A critical test of Speaker Johnson and Senate Democrats
The coming congressional theater will first pose an early test of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s capacity to enact Trump’s agenda with a minuscule Republican majority. Stopgap spending bills generally alienate conservative fiscal hawks and members of the far-right Freedom Caucus. But Trump is demanding unity from his side and is billing this measure — which freezes top-line spending but raises funding for his priorities, including defense and border security — as a down payment on deep government cuts to come.
Republican leaders are telling members that passing the stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, would give them more time to codify Musk’s government cuts in a future bill and avoid a GOP split that could hamper Trump’s ambitious agenda, including his push for huge tax cuts.
Still, the failure to produce detailed spending plans for individual government departments and the decision to push vital decisions down the road raises doubts about the House majority’s capacity to function. The bill does not, for instance, deal with the need to raise the government’s borrowing limit — another looming crisis that could cause economic contagion within weeks without prompt action. It also fails to codify Musk’s swing at federal government jobs and programs into law — perhaps because they’re increasingly divisive and could threaten GOP unity.
Trump is betting that support for Musk’s mission among MAGA base voters will convince GOP lawmakers who are usually skeptical of such measures to back this temporary fix. “All Republicans should vote (Please!) YES next week,” he wrote Saturday on Truth Social, adding, “NO DISSENT.”
His strategy may be working. Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, a scourge of continuing resolutions, told Steve Bannon’s podcast last week he’d back “keeping the lights on” in government with a stopgap bill to create time for Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to keep wielding the spending ax. And Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said he fully supported the measure. “Congress must keep the government open so that DOGE can continue to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in our government. This continuing resolution is necessary to advance President Trump’s agenda,” the Maryland Republican wrote on X.
Democrats claim the bill is a passport for more Musk chaos
House Democrats are resolved to oppose the bill in one of the most significant early moments of the new Congress. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that the plan is a “power grab for the White House and further allows unchecked billionaire Elon Musk and President Trump to steal from the American people.” The Connecticut lawmaker argued that by giving up on passing full-year spending bills, Republicans had handed their power to “an unelected billionaire.”
The Tesla chief has now pledged to consult with Republicans in Congress on his deep cuts to government jobs and spending, after lawmakers started to receive backlash from some of their constituents. Johnson hopes to codify the cuts in new measures late in the year — a much heavier lift than the current short-term patch.
Democrats are still struggling for an effective counter to Trump’s executive power blitzkrieg in his first six weeks in office. And their uncoordinated and futile protests during the president’s address to Congress last week underscored the lack of internal coherence in the party on the way ahead.
If the stopgap spending bill reaches the Senate, party leaders will face a dilemma. For now, they are calling for a resumption of bipartisan negotiations on full-year budget bills shelved by Johnson and Trump, in what seems more like a public relations exercise than a serious political strategy.
A failure to block the measure — which the party has the power to do, given the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate — could further demoralize supporters and underscore the impotence of Democrats in Republican-dominated Washington.
But if Democrats do block the bill and are instrumental in shutting down the government and vital services, they risk hurting their own constituents and distracting from the political heat that is beginning to build on Trump and Musk. Democrats want to show that the GOP can’t govern — and some lawmakers believe they shouldn’t get in the way of what they see as Trump’s chaos and malfeasance. Shutting the government to save it also seems like a logical stretch. And there’s political peril, too, since many Americans support the president’s aspirations to downsize the federal machine — even if some doubt his methods.
Sen. Andy Kim told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday that Johnson’s failure to discuss a spending bill with Democrats showed a failure of Republican leadership. Kim called for a 30-day stopgap bill to allow talks to continue. The New Jersey Democrat added of Johnson: “He’s really showing just how bad he is at governing right now. … He’s the one that’s walking away from this bipartisan talk right now.”
But Kim exemplified the Democrats’ tricky position when he was asked whether he will oppose the stopgap bill if it reaches the Senate. “Well, it’s not simple yet, because we don’t know what the House is going to do,” he said.
Some Democrats believe the short-term bill is largely irrelevant, since Trump, through Musk, has been making unilateral decisions to cut government programs, staff and agencies that Congress has already funded in a potentially unconstitutional process that faces several court challenges.
“Look, the president has been deciding how to spend the money any way he wants even when we have a budget that both Democrats and Republicans voted on,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That’s a constitutional issue, right? Everyone knows Congress has the power of the purse. So, until I see some assurances that whatever we pass next week is going to ensure that the money is spent the way Congress intends, I’m going to withhold my vote until I see that.”
Sen. Patty Murray, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, blasted the continuing resolution as a “slush fund” designed to give Musk and Trump more power over critical spending investments in states and districts that support students, veterans, families and patients. The Washington state Democrat added: “Instead of turning the keys over to the Trump administration with this bill, Congress should immediately pass a short-term CR to prevent a shutdown and finish work on bipartisan funding bills that invest in families, keep America safe, and ensure our constituents have a say in how federal funding is spent.”
But if Johnson and Trump get their way in the House, that path will be closed, and Senate Democrats will confront an unpalatable choice they don’t yet seem willing to face.
