Washington (AFP) – The US government, already shaken by Donald Trump’s radical reforms, could begin shutting down entirely this weekend as Democrats grapple with the option of opposing the president’s federal funding plans — at the risk this blows up in their faces. With a Friday night deadline to fund the government or allow it to start winding down its operations, the Senate is set for a crunch vote ahead of the midnight cut-off on a Trump-backed bill passed by the House of Representatives. The package would keep the lights on through September, but Democrats are under immense pressure from their own grassroots to defy Trump and reject a text they say is full of harmful spending cuts.
“If it shuts down, it’s not the Republicans’ fault. We passed a bill… If there’s a shutdown, even the Democrats admit it will be their fault,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. A handful of Democrats in Trump-supporting states — worried that they would be blamed for forcing a stoppage with no obvious exit ramp — appear ready to incur the wrath of their own supporters by backing down. But the vote remains on a knife edge, with many Democrats yet to reveal their decision.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who voted against a bill to avert a shutdown as recently as 18 months ago, urged the minority party to “put partisan politics aside and do the right thing.” “When the government shuts down, you have government employees who are no longer paid, you have services that begin to lag. It brings great harm on the economy and the people,” he told Fox News.
The funding fight is focused on opposition to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), unofficially spearheaded by tech mega-billionaire and Trump advisor Elon Musk, which is working to dramatically reduce the size of the government. DOGE aims to cut federal spending by $1 trillion this year and claims to have made savings so far of $115 billion through lease terminations, contract cancellations, and firing federal workers. Its online “wall of receipts” accounts for a tiny portion of that total, however, and US media outlets have found its website to be riddled with errors, misleading math, and exaggerations.
Grassroots Democrats, infuriated by what they see as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO’s lawless rampage through the federal bureaucracy, want their leaders to stand up to DOGE and Trump. The funding bill is likely to need support from at least eight Democrats in the Senate, but its Republican authors ignored the minority party’s demands to protect Congress’s authority over the government’s purse strings and rein in Musk. Washington progressive representative Pramila Jayapal told CNN there would be a “huge backlash” against Senate Democrats supporting the bill.
Several top Democrats have warned, however, that a shutdown could play into Musk’s hands, making further layoffs easier and distracting from DOGE’s most unpopular actions, which just this week have included firing half the Education Department’s workforce. “Now it’s a (bill) that we all agree we don’t like — but for me we can’t ever allow the government to shut down,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman told CNN. “If you shut it down, you will impact and hurt millions and millions and millions of Americans, and you run the risk of slipping us into a recession.”
Republicans control 53 seats in the 100-member Senate. Legislation in the upper chamber requires a preliminary ballot with a 60-vote threshold — designed to encourage bipartisanship — before final passage, which only needs a simple majority. Fetterman is the only Democrat publicly committed to voting yes, but more senators from the minority party could follow suit if Republicans allow amendment votes on issues important to them. Each would fail, but it is a face-saving exercise that would allow Democrats to tell their activists at home that they fought for their principles. It is not clear, however, that this would shield them from the criticism that they bent the knee to Trump and Musk.
© 2024 AFP
