The Clock Is Ticking on a Lose-Lose Government Shutdown

The government could shut down at midnight. On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump met with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and their Republican counterparts, John Thune and Mike Johnson. The intended goal of the meeting was to prevent the looming government shutdown.

The Democrats’ core issue is that they want the funding bill to include an extension on subsidies for Affordable Care Act health care programs, which are due to expire at the end of year, or as an official from Jeffries’s office texted me earlier, “Today Leader Jeffries will reaffirm Democrats’ commitment to canceling the cuts, lowering costs, and saving health care directly in the Oval Office.” Perhaps not the easiest thing to message, but Obamacare is wildly popular and the price of insurance going up is not.

Before heading into the meeting, Schumer told me: “It’s up to the president and Republicans. Will they come into the meeting to seriously negotiate? Democrats have been resolute that we need a real negotiation, that you don’t do this with one party putting together a completely partisan bill and saying, ‘Take it or leave it.’ So they felt the heat. The president at first said no. Then he said yes for a meeting, then he said no for a meeting and went on a rant against Democrats. But they felt the heat and they now want to sit down today. But the fundamental question hasn’t been answered yet, and we’ll see if it is today: Are they serious about negotiating with us in a real way?” Unsurprisingly they were not.

That question, it seemed, had been answered much earlier, when one White House official told Politico on Friday, Trump “read all the shit they’re asking for, and he said, ‘On second thought, go fuck yourself.’”

But speaking to reporters after the meeting, Schumer said that he “laid out to the president some of the consequences of what’s happening in health care, and by his face and by the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time.”

And now, with government funding due to run out, the two sides are locked in an unwinnable standoff. On one side, Trump doesn’t seem to care whether the government runs effectively or at all. On the other, Democrats find themselves in a difficult position: to fund the government and watch Republicans continue disassembling it, or shut down the government and inadvertently give Trump even more power.

Shutting down the government is the only power Democrats have. But the Democratic leadership focused on health care probably because they think that the issue will garner more support among the base than, say, shutting down the president’s paramilitary organization (ICE). Even some Republicans want to extend ACA subsidies and Obamacare is popular, even if it’s not super easy to explain. One has to wonder if Democrats will succeed at creating a clear message around something as complicated as the idea of subsidies. Especially considering that JD Vance and others are parroting a concise, if misleading soundbite that the Democrats are trying to shut down the government in order to provide “health care for illegal aliens.”

Or as David Axelrod texted me, “Shutdowns rarely end well for the opposition party, so there is considerable risk associated with it, depending how long it lasts, what ensues as a result, and how it ends. But submission without concessions also has a cost, and the acute health care crisis is an important battle.”

Shutdowns are about blame. The party that is blamed for the shutdown loses the shutdown. Do voters blame the party in power (usually they do), or do voters blame the opposition party? Trump is about as unpopular as he’s ever been, but that doesn’t mean Democratic leadership is popular.

And Trump has the advantage of holding the loudest megaphone. On Friday he told reporters, “If it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down. But they’re the ones that are shutting down government.” And Trump has also posted on social media that Democrats are “threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles, allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody.” None of this is true, but in Trump’s post-truth world, what people believe may ultimately be more meaningful than the facts.

Republicans have advertised, or perhaps threatened, that they will seize more power if there is a shutdown: Last Wednesday, Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, released a memo in which, according to Politico the office “told agencies to identify programs, projects and activities where discretionary funding will lapse Oct. 1 and no alternative funding source is available.” The memo also revealed that OMB was instructing agencies to begin planning so-called reduction-in-force plans “that would go beyond standard furloughs, permanently eliminating jobs in programs not consistent with President Donald Trump’s priorities in the event of a shutdown.”

Lest you think Vought is making an idle threat, he is not. He is one of the architects of Project 2025. Vought believes that the federal government is “costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt.”

“If I were a Democrat and Russ Vought was in charge of OMB, I would have nightmares about what Russ could do that you couldn’t undo when government reopens,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk show host who’s reportedly known the OMB director for decades, told The Boston Globe’s Tal Kopan. “Russ has waited for this moment his whole life.”

This is the threat Republicans used when government funding was running out earlier in the year, and ultimately Schumer and the Democrats ended up supporting an extension. But a lot has happened since March; the Big Beautiful Bill has expanded ICE to the tune of billions of dollars, and Republicans have continued to DOGE the federal government. And the ruling party’s popularity has been in decline.

If the government shuts down, Vought and Trump “will have enormous latitude to determine which services, programs, and employees can be sidelined, decisions that could go far beyond what has occurred during past shutdowns,” writes Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. This is a real worry; Democrats have a much lower pain threshold than Republicans. Republicans want to shrink the government because it’s part of their larger gestalt, whereas Democrats worry that if thousands of Americans lose access to health care it might be hard for them to get it again.

When I talked to Democrats, it really felt like they wanted a deal and thought maybe they could push the administration into some kind of agreement. Probably all that was squashed last night when Trump posted a vulgar AI-generated deepfake video with mariachi music and Jeffries in a sombrero. Ultimately Democrats are going to have the same problem everyone else does when they’re negotiating with Trump: He’s Trump.