Senate Democrats appear poised to vote for a spending bill they hate to avoid a worse fate: Allowing a government shutdown that could enable President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to make deeper cuts to federal agencies.
The announcement late Thursday by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would support the House GOP’s seven-month stopgap measure was an acknowledgment that Democrats have little choice if they want to avoid empowering Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to unilaterally halt more federal programs under the cover of a shutdown.
“The Democrats have A or B: Keep the government open or yield the authority to the president,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a Trump ally who speaks frequently with White House officials, said in an interview.
In a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday night announcing he would support the House-passed stopgap, Schumer said he had little choice as the Friday shutdown deadline loomed.
“Musk has already said he wants a shutdown, and public reporting has shown he is already making plans to expedite his destruction of key government programs and services,” said Schumer. “A shutdown would give Donald Trump the keys to the city, the state and the country.”
The White House would not telegraph its shutdown plans, including whether it would unilaterally halt federal programs and furlough workers. Nor would it detail the work DOGE could undertake if most of the federal government were non-operational.
But on Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers were saying the quiet part out loud: By opposing the GOP’s funding plan in protest of Trump’s dismantling of government, Democrats would, in fact, be helping his cause.
“We’re cutting employees right now, because we’re trying to save costs,” Mullin continued. “And if the Democrats are going to play a game and shut it down — and then yield the power to him — it’ll be really easy for them to lift up the hood, look at all the essential and non-essential employees. Seems like to me it plays in their favor.”
Punctuating that threat, Musk on Wednesday night responded on X with a thinking-face emoji to a suggestion from another social media user that furloughed workers should not be brought back on the government payroll after a shutdown.
Handing Trump the power to decide what parts of the federal government are essential has been high on the list of risks Senate Democrats have been weighing. They essentially face a…
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