Shutdown Looms as Dems Oppose GOP’s Bid to Keep Govt Open

House Democratic leadership is opposing Republicans‘ plans to avoid a government shutdown next week, with leaders calling the proposal “not acceptable.”

Government funding expires on March 14. GOP leaders are preparing to put a continuing resolution, or CR, up for a vote on Tuesday that will freeze current spending levels until the end of the fiscal 2025 on Sept. 30.

With bipartisan congressional appropriators so far unable to come to an agreement on a topline number for a bigger funding package, the CR is viewed as a temporary fix to keep government operations running past the deadline.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter to members, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar (D-CA) blasted Republicans for putting a “partisan continuing resolution” to fund the government for the rest of the year.

“We cannot back a measure that rips away life-sustaining healthcare and retirement benefits from everyday Americans as part of the Republican scheme to pay for massive tax cuts for their wealthy donors like Elon Musk,” the leaders wrote. “Medicaid is our redline.”

Jeffries’s statement comes in contrast to GOP leadership’s stated plans to present a continuing resolution that doesn’t reduce spending but keeps funding levels stagnate for the rest of the year. The text of that resolution is expected in the coming days. Democrats had preferred a very short-term CR to give bipartisan congressional negotiators more time to forge a deal on new 2026 spending levels.

Jeffries said in his weekly press conference on Thursday and reiterated in the letter that House Democrats would meet on Tuesday morning to decide the path forward for whether to vote on the CR.

Continuing resolutions have been used several times under House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) leadership, with hard-line conservatives typically opposing the measure while conservative and centrist Democrats often cross party lines to help push it over the finish line.

This time, however, hard-liners are surprisingly rallying behind the full-year CR after a small group of them met with President Donald Trump at the White House this week. Many have attributed their support for the stop-gap spending deal to the work being done by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.

“The ground in Washington is very different from the way it was before January 20,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-MD), who attended the meeting, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

He thinks Musk and DOGE have done “tremendous work at uncovering the fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government.”

“The President has asked us to not have the government shut down on the 14th so that DOGE and Elon Musk can continue their work and help deliver President Trump’s agenda for the American people,” Harris said.

During the conversation with the president, Trump acknowledged that he “doesn’t like continuing resolutions either,” Harris said. He pointed to the many times Trump told Republicans to shut the government down rather than vote for a CR.

“But now that he’s president, he knows that — that he needs the government to stay open in order to, again, continue the work of those and Elon Musk’s work,” Harris said.

“I think that circumstance is entirely different now from continuing resolutions we’ve been asked to vote on in the past,” the chairman added.

Johnson said in an appearance on Fox News’s Outnumbered that Democrats are demonstrating a “lack of principle” by urging a shutdown.

“The fact that they’re trying to orchestrate illustrates what we said earlier…they are flailing,” the speaker said. “They don’t have a vision, a platform, a party. It’s in disarray, and they don’t have anything else to do.”

Johnson emphasized Republicans are putting a “clean CR” on the floor, something Democrats said would be the only way they would vote for it under the Biden administration. Trump himself said last year, when he was a presidential candidate, that he was opposed to clean CRs.

Republicans are prepared to blame Democrats for wanting to shut down the government.

“The hypocrisy is stunning,” Harris said. “On the one hand, they’re complaining about laying off a few thousand federal workers by the Trump administration. On the other hand, they’re basically willing to shut down the federal government and see the furloughing of millions of government employees.”

Harris added that if government funding expires, Democrats will have to “explain that to the American people.” That could be detrimental for Democrats, who are already facing a messaging crisis after the 2024 election results showed working-class voters trended toward Trump over issues like the economy and immigration.

Democrats, for their part, are working overtime blasting Musk as an unelected billionaire who is overextending his authority as one of Trump’s advisers.

They’ve also zeroed in on the GOP budget reconciliation process, accusing Republicans of wanting to slash Medicaid and other benefits to meet a proposed $2 trillion in spending cuts.

Part of the savings under the House GOP-passed budget resolution calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion from programs it oversees. Democrats’ argument got a boost this week after the Congressional Budget Office released a report that found it would be difficult to fulfill that obligation without cutting Medicaid benefits.

Eyes will be on the Democrats to see how they handle the government shutdown. While Jeffries has insisted that the caucus is united in pushing back against the spending deal, it is possible that some swing-district or Trump-district Democrats such as Reps. Jared Golden (D-ME) or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) will vote in favor of the CR.

Johnson currently holds a one-seat majority, making it difficult to pass legislation along party lines. Other hard-liners such as Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) have said they will support the CR, adding that they are “ready to advance the ball next week and move” Trump’s agenda forward.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has already signaled he will vote against the CR because it would not include the cuts identified by Musk and DOGE. Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX) also said he was a “NO” on the CR.

“Congress needs to do its job and pass a conservative budget! CR’s are code for Continued Rubberstamp of fraud, waste, and abuse,” Gonzalez wrote in a post on Sunday.