The News
Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have big plans starting in January. This week’s shutdown fight isn’t helping them with those — and foreshadows an extremely challenging 2025.
Even if Trump’s party can avoid a government shutdown, an outcome that the president-elect didn’t seem to mind too much as he called for a shutdown to “begin now, under the Biden administration, not after January 20,” Republicans will now enter 2025 in a wounded state. While President Joe Biden is not exerting himself to help get a deal during his last month in office, the biggest victim of this week’s funding fight is almost surely Trump’s agenda.
Even before Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance followed billionaire supporter Elon Musk by delivering a last-minute blow to a bipartisan government funding deal, it was clear that Republicans’ decision to negotiate over only three months of funding would be damaging. That length of a short-term spending bill will force the GOP to juggle federal spending alongside Trump’s other priorities.
And no matter what length of a funding bill eventually passes, Democrats will have leverage when it expires, on funding and the debt limit. Which means this week won’t be the end of Republicans’ internal troubles, no matter how it turns out.
“One of the things that I’ve learned about myself, the older I get, the more sanguine [I am] … because otherwise I’d be a screaming mess,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. “It’s not going to get better, like early in the year particularly. Anyway.”
It will probably take weeks to grind through Trump’s Cabinet nominees, starting with committee hearings in early January and moving onto floor votes starting on Jan. 20. Then the House and Senate will need to synchronize on a budget to start work on any filibuster-proof legislation. Ultimately, Republicans will have to agree on those bills with no margin for error in the House and little margin for error in the Senate.
The party’s disorganization around a simple 12 weeks of government funding only reinforces how hard it will be for them to get through those tasks during Trump’s first year. And now Republicans know Trump, Vance and Musk can unravel the party’s legislative plan on a dime if they don’t like it – regardless of how much work went into it.
Worst of all, if House Speaker Mike Johnson’s last-gasp effort to stop a shutdown falls apart, a long-term funding lapse would deliver a brutal blow to Republican efforts.
“Shutdowns are never good. I mean, nobody wins,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the incoming majority leader. He blamed Democrats for not passing funding bills earlier this year but acknowledged, when it comes to the GOP agenda and beyond: “Shutdowns aren’t good.”
Know More
There’s still time for Republicans to figure this out. A few hours is an eternity in the Capitol, and there are strong incentives for people to bend on Friday. Many lawmakers are retiring, a new president is arriving and Democrats are ceding their Senate majority.
A weekend shutdown would not be ideal, but if Congress can figure things out before Monday, a lot of damage could be mitigated.
That, of course, would require Trump to approve — or at least not oppose — of the latest solution to fund the government, which does not include the quick action on the federal debt limit that he has pushed for.
Republicans will then have to avoid putting themselves in the same position again next year; when they have total power over Congress, blaming Chuck Schumer will have less resonance. They’re talking, as both parties often have in the past, of finally ending Congress’ penchant for blowing its own deadlines and taking up regular spending bills.
“This is a failure of Chuck Schumer. This is a consequence of not doing our job,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., said of the Senate Democratic leader. “We have an opportunity as Republicans … we’ve been talking about it. In January, it’s our turn to do it. And I believe we will.”
The View From Democrats
Democrats are already starting to get into more of a post-election messaging groove as Republicans juggle orders from Trump and Musk. They see plenty of opportunity to expose the GOP as incapable of governing.
“I don’t think American voters sent everybody to Congress for this kind of nonsense. I think they expected us to get our damn jobs done. This is not what the election was about,” said Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn.
Burgess’s view
The House majority is going to shrink next year, and the GOP’s job will get harder. Getting pretty much the entire party on board with unilateral bills is going to be really tough and require way more coordination with Trump – and possibly Musk, too?
Trump’s attempts to pin a potential shutdown on Biden is a sign that this week is probably just the first of many frantic funding fights. In his first term, Trump oversaw a lengthy year-end partial shutdown that ran into a new Congress in 2018 and 2019. It did not go well, resulting in no border wall concessions from Democrats and a small GOP rebellion against him.
A shutdown this time would have that energy on steroids, complicating Johnson’s pursuit of the speakership and potentially Trump’s inauguration, to say nothing of the negative domino effect on his agenda and the more wide-ranging economic consequences of a full shutdown.
It’s no wonder Republicans are racking their brains about how to get out of this one.