Congressional leaders in both parties are facing a host of political risks and real-world consequences for the country in a spending standoff that is threatening a government shutdown within days.
For Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, it is his first big spending showdown as majority leader.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, is toiling to hold on to his narrow House majority, keenly aware that the fight carries risks for his members — and that a spending deal with Democrats cost his predecessor his job.
For Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both Democrats of New York, the fight is a chance to show a restive base that is hungry for a battle that they are willing to wage one with President Trump.
The four leaders are set to meet with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon to address the looming shutdown deadline. Unless they can reach a swift agreement to extend spending and push it through Congress within hours, federal funding is set to lapse after midnight on Tuesday.
Here’s a look at the stakes facing each leader, and their strategies.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York
Mr. Schumer faces perhaps more pressure in the current confrontation than any other leader on Capitol Hill. While House Republicans can pass spending legislation without any Democratic votes — which they recently did — the majority party in the Senate needs the buy-in of at least some members of the minority to clear a funding bill.
The five-term Democrat’s shutdown perspective is informed by a pair of cautionary tales. When he stood firm against Mr. Trump in 2018 and refused to agree to fund the government without deportation protections for some undocumented immigrants, Republicans hammered him relentlessly for causing what they branded the “Schumer Shutdown.”
He buckled days later, quickly agreeing to a deal to reopen the government.
In March, Mr. Schumer shelved his objections — and those of many in his own party — and agreed to Mr. Trump’s demand for a funding extension with no concessions, arguing a shutdown would only further empower the White House.
He suffered a bitter backlash from the left that included calls for him to step down as Democratic leader, and in the weeks after, polling showed that his approval rating among New Yorkers had dipped to a 20-year low.
This time, Mr. Schumer has made a different calculation, choosing to use his leverage to pick a fight with Mr. Trump on money for health care — an issue on which polls show Democrats have the upper hand — and dare the president and Republicans to say no.
He has argued that with unpopular Medicaid cuts in place and Obamacare coverage subsidies slated to expire at the end of the year, Democrats have a mandate to demand concessions from the G.O.P., which they believe will pay a political price for refusing to agree.
“There’s going to be huge pressure on Republican senators, congressmen, and even Trump to do something about this horrible health care crisis,” Mr. Schumer said on Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “Closing of the rural hospitals, people’s premiums going up $4,000 a year. A middle-class family can’t afford that.”
Mr. Schumer is also the veteran Democrat in the current standoff, having known Mr. Trump for years and become accustomed to negotiating and verbally sparring with the president in front of television cameras in the Oval Office. His counterpart in the House, Mr. Jeffries, has never formally met with Mr. Trump.
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota
Mr. Thune, in his first year as majority leader, is facing the unenviable job of running the Senate, which is designed to operate by consensus, at a time when the president of his own party has shown little appetite for compromise.
He has forcefully made the case that voters will blame Democrats for shutting down the government, after they blocked House Republicans’ short-term funding bill.
“What the Democrats have done here is take the federal government as a hostage — and for that matter, by extension, the American people — to try and get a whole laundry list of things that they want,” Mr. Thune said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
But it also falls to Mr. Thune to round up Republican support for whatever Mr. Trump agrees to in negotiations with Democrats, and to try to ensure that the president does not make any high-profile commitments that could disadvantage his party.
The president has a history of complicating Republicans’ position in high-stakes negotiations when he sits down with Democrats, most notably in 2018, when Mr. Trump declared in a televised negotiating session with Mr. Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, then the Democratic leader, that he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security.”
And with his majority at stake, Mr. Thune does not want to do anything to jeopardize the re-election chances of Republican senators, such as Susan Collins of Maine, who are facing tough races and have said they’d like to extend the health care subsidies.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York
This is Mr. Jeffries’s first legislative confrontation as the top House Democrat with Mr. Trump, and comes at a time when the party base is demanding more pugilism from its leaders. He has never met with Mr. Trump, much less for high-stakes negotiations.
“You’d have to ask him, or people close to him, what the issue is, what the concern is,” Mr. Jeffries said.
Even back in March, Mr. Jeffries’s caucus was spoiling for a spending showdown with Mr. Trump. At the time, every single House Democrat voted against the stopgap bill to avert a shutdown. This month, all but one did. Mr. Jeffires has approached the spending showdown as a chance to hone his party’s message going into the 2026 midterm elections, hammering home his contention that G.O.P. lawmakers slavishly follow Mr. Trump, with disastrous consequences for the country.
“The notion that we’re just supposed to fall in line and bend the knee — they’re sadly confused about who we are,” Mr. Jeffries said. “That’s what Republicans have been doing, serving as a reckless rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s extreme agenda.”
The test for Mr. Jeffries during a shutdown is whether he can hold his caucus together even as Mr. Trump and his top deputies seek to ratchet up the pain felt, as they have already signaled they plan to do. While the more progressive members of Mr. Jeffries’s caucus are eager to scrap with Mr. Trump, others who have to defend seats in competitive districts could soon try to seek an off-ramp from a shutdown.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana
In some ways, Mr. Johnson has already cleared his biggest hurdle. He was able to muster his unruly conference into voting for a stopgap funding bill that contained no spending cuts or conservative policy dictates, something many of them have long opposed, thus forcing Senate Democrats to choose whether to block it.
That spared him the kind of intraparty fight that took down his predecessor, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, after he was forced to turn to Democrats to supply the votes to avoid a shutdown.
Mr. Trump holds perhaps his greatest sway over House Republicans, and Mr. Johnson has long been forced to rely on the president to personally whip recalcitrant lawmakers into providing their votes for bills they do not support.
In the event of a shutdown, Mr. Johnson wants to protect his fragile majority in next year’s midterm elections, and must prioritize the needs of Republicans in competitive districts, many of whom are eager to vote on legislation extending the Obamacare subsidies.
But he is juggling those demands with the orthodoxy of many in the hard-right flank of his conference, who have said they would revolt over spending more money to continue Covid-era tax subsidies for a program that they despise.
Still, many hard-liners in the House Republican Conference have often claimed that they would oppose legislation they deemed insufficiently conservative, only to reverse course at Mr. Trump’s behest.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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