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The myopia is blinding.
As President Donald Trump blasts through a Washington that is clearly struggling to keep pace with his disruptive moves on everything from names on maps to the fate of backwater parts of the bureaucracy to the new, confusing U.S. strategy on the future of Ukraine, keeping the establishment perpetually off balance may well be the prevailing vibe over the next four years.
What almost everyone is missing: This country has roughly one month until the government runs out of money, and things like paychecks to troops, food-inspection programs, disaster-relief payments, and aid to low-income families could all be caught up in a chaotic game of chicken. Republicans could keep the lights on all on their own, but probably won’t. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government,” House minority leader Speaker Hakeem Jeffries told reporters last week, setting up a blame-game preamble. Jeffries is factually correct. Even still, Republicans may end up needing a bailout from Democratic lawmakers before March 14. That gives Democrats their first real leverage in Trump’s second term, but it’s entirely unclear if they will use it or to what end. While a unified plan has yet to emerge, wisps of fight-ready ambitions are starting to move from the fringes to the mainstream, albeit more slowly than most rank-and-file Democrats would like.
That’s not to say Republicans have their own house in order. Even though House Republicans pushed through a budget outline on Thursday after 12 hours of debate, there’s no guarantee that it proves sufficiently lean for budget hardliners on the Right. Meanwhile, the Senate has plenty of ideas for its own spending plan, including possibly splitting Trump’s agenda into two discrete pieces. That is setting up an intra-party collision that is all too familiar from the first Trump term.
It’s not a stretch to say that Democrats could end up being needed to pass a bill they abhor to avoid a catastrophic collapse entirely not of their making—but within their power to avert.
Lost to no one is the man sitting in the Oval Office already holds the record for the longest government shutdown in history, the 35-day shutdown in 2018 into 2019 over Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion in border fencing. (He eventually wrestled $1.375 billion for it, while the total cost of the shutdown to the whole U.S. economy hit $11 billion, according to the non-partisan congressional scorekeepers.) Like so much of his first term, the shutdown let Trump create a problem and then take credit for ending it. He saw that as a win.
As odds of shutdown grow, here are the realities facing Washington that are coloring the negotiations, and the possible offramps from the status quo.
Trump is setting up a constitutional crisis
All the signs are here. The White House says it is charging forward despite federal judges telling officials to, at a minimum, pump the brakes. Whether it actually upends the United States’ system of checks and balances in the coming weeks will shape the budget negotiations. If Trump and Elon Musk continue to treat the spending laws already passed by Congress as mere suggestions, there won’t be much faith that the next spending bills will bind Trump’s team to actually following the orders from Capitol Hill.
Trump has already nixed most of the workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development, scorched the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and is set to dismantle the Education Department—all created and funded by Congress. On Thursday, Trump’s H.R. arm told as many as 200,000 feds with less than two years in their jobs that their careers as civil servants were over. The move, if it survives any legal challenges, will gut the federal government of its next generation of career professionals.
Federal judges say so much of what Trump is creating is afield from what’s allowed, but there’s a limit on what they can do. And the White House knows it. Being held in contempt is about the worst of it, after all.
Meanwhile, Trump cannot stop jabbering about serving a potential third term, a blatant violation of the Constitution’s cap on terms Presidents can serve these days.
For Democrats in particular, this all makes it harder for them to consider helping Trump’s party look responsible enough to keep the government functioning at the most basic level.
Republicans in Congress remain terrified of Trump
Yet with few exceptions, the top leaders in the GOP are deferring to the White House on these big moves, even as it is increasingly clear to them that Musk’s woodchipper is advancing Trump’s agenda in ways they imagined only they could do.
Even though there have been plenty of grumblings—some more stage-whispered than others—about the executive branch’s seemingly vamped approach to foreign policy, domestic spending, and personnel, Trump has mostly gotten his way. “We need to come to terms” with Trump’s confusing tariff strategy, said the top Republican on a Ways and Means subcommittee on trade, Rep. Adrian Smith of farm-export-heavy Nebraska. Translation: whatever Trump wants is what the GOP supports.
Similarly, there were plenty of folks unamused with the nominations of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth. Yet Trump got his way on all of them, and Hegseth is already telling Ukraine that its aspirations to join NATO are not going to happen and that its borders are never returning to pre-invasion places despite plenty—if uneven—of support for Kyiv from Congress. When Trump has needed to, the threat of primaries has cowed the skeptics back into line. (Just ask Sen. Thom Tillis what motivated his brazen capitulation on Hegseth. Or Sen. Susan Collins’ baffling blink on the whole lot of them.) That compliance has only fueled Trump’s indifference to courts or the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
While there are spots of concern for Republicans—many on Capitol Hill recognize Trump’s efforts on the economy have fallen short of his campaign rhetoric and his pledges to take over Gaza and expel millions of Palestinians have been unhelpful—they also see a party leader who, at the moment, has little reason to check himself. By and large, voters seem to have positive reactions to his early moves, according to a CBS News poll released this week. While 85% of Democrats and 51% of indies disapprove of Trump, they’re still not enough to tank his overall 53% job approval rating.
A separate YouGov poll finds both Trump’s net approval and net favorability numbers are higher than at any point during his first term. While the post-Inauguration surge has faded, he’s still above water and raging at anyone who dares defy him.
Put simply: as long as the President is not dragging down other Republicans, they’re fine tethering themselves to him. A shutdown, though, is a tough sell to voters who sent Trump back to Washington to shake things up, not send it spiraling.
Democrats don’t have a plan
But they have frustrations.
For the last three weeks, Democrats up and down the seniority list have been stuck playing an especially frustrating game of Whac-a-Mole: smack the outrage of the hour and then race to hit the next one, never quite leveling the field.
Prosecutors are being booted, FBI agents are being purged, criminal cases are being dropped, watchdogs are being shown the doors, commissions and boards are being gutted, and whole agencies are being mothballed. The gush of news has been impossible to keep arms around, and Democrats’ messaging machine has been lurching and lunging without a clear direction.
“I’m getting more and more furious,” Mr. Schumer told The New York Times.
But fury is not a strategy.
Some Democrats are calling for cooperation on parts of Trump’s agenda that make sense for their constituents. (Rust Belt lawmakers are particularly open to Trump’s protectionist posture on trade.) Others are of the mind to extract maximum concessions if they’re going to have to help maintain a functioning government. (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been at the vanguard of this wing.) Yet others are realistic: any action here will anger some corner of the Democratic coalition that, at the moment, is far from unified or confident that their team in Washington knows what’s next.
But they have to do something. The congressional phone system, which typically handles about 40 calls per minute to the 540 offices is now fielding more than 1,500 each minute. That public response, along with not-so-subtle threats from groups on the Left, is forcing Democrats to think again about their path forward, and see if there’s any outcome where they don’t end up taking blame for it.
Still, this spending plan is going to be done under the cover of a procedural trick that both parties have used in the past to get things across the finish line with a bare majority, meaning Senate Republicans don’t need a single Democratic vote to get this done. But that assumes House Republicans remain unified, a risky bet at best in a party beset by factionalism, which leaves Democrats with a choice between keeping the government’s doors open or letting them slam shut, and allowing at least some conservative outlets and influencers to pin the outcome on them at least as much as the party in control. (Keep in mind, about 80% of federal workers go to jobs beyond the Beltway, so this becomes a local story in almost every corner of the country.)
Then there’s this grim reality: House Speaker Mike Johnson might not be able to keep his job if he repeatedly has to rely on Democratic goodwill. Democrats have said they might help only in exchange for some of their own priorities, and concessions to Democrats traditionally have been career poison for Johnson’s predecessors. “Given the Republican majority’s attempts to completely gut the federal government, any concession necessary for the Democratic Party to assist them in passing a (continuing resolution) must be incredibly substantial,” Ocasio-Cortez said, setting up another power play that tempts the GOP leadership into a short-term trap.
The reality hasn’t yet registered with voters
If you haven’t heard about this looming shutdown, expect to hear a lot in the next few weeks from lawmakers, especially if you live in a Democratic enclave. That’s because, in a rare show of coordination, House Democrats plan to use the current recess to tell constituents back home about the ticking threat buried in the rubble of Trump’s march through Washington.
But for most voters, this is all too familiar. A brinksmanship game is now almost passe in Washington, and most of the time both parties find an off-ramp at the eleventh hour that leaves everyone a little sour. Unless they don’t.
Voters’ minds are fleeting and blame has a quick half-life in Washington. Trump’s record showdown tanked his poll numbers, but it took less than a month of restored government for him to climb out of the pre-standoff rut. (The government reopened on Jan. 25, 2019, and Trump’s polling on Feb. 22 had him stronger than before he presided over darkened federal machinery.)
This time around, the government faces another make-or-break funding deadline on March 14, and both parties at the Capitol say they are way, way apart on how to fix it. The churn coming out of the White House madlibs machine of headlines is tough to mute, but the responsible caucus in both parties is quietly trying to navigate in the background lest things blow apart. For once, a kick-the-can-down-the-road band-aid seems responsible given how unpredictable the rest of Washington is behaving. Because, to be clear, the proposals on the table cover spending only through Oct. 1, and there remain serious disagreements between House and Senate Republicans about just how big of a bite to take right now.
Yet without Trump’s blessing, that fight-another-day cohort is working without any real guarantees the White House or even their party leadership will endorse it. Publicly, neither side has said a Plan B is worth considering.
Real lives are impacted by the chaos. It could get much worse.
Almost $40 million in U.S.-grown humanitarian food aid is sitting in Houston, at risk of rotting or spoiling. A similar scene is playing out in warehouses, ships, and ports across the world, all adding up to roughly half-a-billion-dollars in such goods going to waste because of Trump abruptly ending U.S.A.I.D. programs, and moving to sack most of its 10,000 employees.
And that’s just one example of how real lives at home and abroad are becoming collateral damage of Trump’s hasty moves. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers stand to be canned in short order. Criminal cases are being dismissed against prospective Trump allies and brought against his perceived enemies. Immigration crises are only just starting to be understood. Student civil rights and loans alike are on the chopping block. And countless wonks have been shown the door in an effort to rid Trump’s government of expertise.
All of this very real harm comes while the federal government’s lights are still on.
The ongoing spending spat is heading toward a violent collision unless both parties’ leaders figure out how to get to a mutually disappointing outcome. On their own, Republicans probably cannot get the package out of the House.
That means Johnson is probably going to need to rely on a handful of votes from Jeffries to keep Democrats’ priorities like HeadStart, food stamps, troop funding, and rent assistance humming along. Democrats have proven willing to help in the past, deciding a line-in-the-sand moment that would pause government is never worth chasing. Just witness last year, when 185 House Democrats and 47 Senate Democrats backed a funding bill that banned Pride flags flying over embassies. Joe Biden signed it rather than see his last year in office include a first lapse in government functionality heading into a presidential campaign.
Republicans are betting that same sober approach—suck it up on imperfect bills in service of keeping the doors open at federal offices—would prevail again. But unlike the Democrats’ help during the Biden era, there’s no telling if Trump even wants to maintain any of the tools of government. Given his ongoing assault on the government he leads, and serious questions about whether Trump would even heed the spending plan they send him and he signs, the state of play in Washington over the next month has rarely looked this muddled. It’s why anyone who relies on government for anything should have March 14 circled in Sharpie, like the one Trump might ultimately use to sign legislation to avoid the lights going dark.
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The post We May Be a Month Away From Republicans Shutting Down a Government They Control appeared first on TIME.
