Funding for the federal government runs out in eight days, on March 14. If Congress doesn't pass, and Trump doesn't sign, a funding bill by the end of the day on March 14, there will be a government shutdown.
Since government funding bills are subject to the 60-vote requirement in the Senate, and since it is uncommon for one party to control the White House, House and Senate, funding the federal government is typically a bipartisan process. Bipartisan agreement will be needed to avert to a government shutdown this time as well, since Republicans control only 53 votes in the Senate, and since they only rarely are able to pass bill through the House of Representatives with just Republican votes, given their narrow 218-214 majority in that chamber. (The number of Democrats in the House of Representatives decreased by one on Tuesday night, when Texas Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner sadly passed away.)
The major sticking point in negotiations to fund the government are the funding freezes and mass layoffs undertaken by the Trump administration through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Top Democratic and Republican appropriators in the House and Senate are close to coming to an agreement on funding levels. However, Democrats in Congress want assurances that the Trump administration won't just impound whatever funding it wants, while Republicans are refusing to make any attempts to rein in Trump and Musk.
This has led many in the Democratic caucus to reluctantly come to the conclusion that they cannot make any agreement with Republicans, and thus the government will shut down. From Politico:
Senior House Democrats have spent recent days privately surveying their members about whether they’d be willing to shut the government down over DOGE cuts, according to multiple well-placed Democratic sources I spoke to over the weekend.
So far, they’re encountering little resistance.
Democrats of all persuasions, even some centrists who have long been firmly anti-shutdown, feel that voting for a “clean” spending bill would be tacitly blessing Musk’s controversial work. Denying Republicans the votes they’ll need to keep the agencies open, they believe, would be the lesser evil.
This is an unenviable position for Democrats to be in. Government shutdowns do not have a good track record when it comes to forcing policy concessions from your opposition—in fact, I am pretty sure they have always failed at achieving that. Additionally, letting the entire government shut down in order to protest parts of the government being shut down is not exactly an intuitive course of action, and as such will not be an easy sell to the public. That said, Trump and Republicans are flat out telling Democrats that Trump doesn't have to honor the terms of any government funding bill that Democrats vote for, so Democrats are not exactly being given a lot of incentive to vote for any government funding bill.
For his part, Donald Trump is trying to amp up the pressure on Democrats by trying to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government through September 30 through the House of Representatives without the need for any Democratic votes. He is doing this by meeting with a handful of House hardline conservatives who always vote against continuing resolutions to fund the government, and personally twisting their arms to get them to come around. Trump seems to be having some success at this, but given that, assuming no absences, he can only lose one Republican vote and still pull it off, passing such a bill with only Republican votes will not be an easy task, even for someone with his level of influence over Republicans.
One factor that might change the situation is that the Trump administration is starting to lose a lot of lawsuits around their mass firings and funding freezes. Just yesterday, the conservative dominated Supreme Court narrowly ruled against the Trump administration on a freeze of $2 billion in foreign aid money. The day before that, the Office of Personnel Management was forced to rescind its memo that demanded the firing of all probationary federal employees. Additionally on Wednesday, thousands of fired USDA employees were reinstated by a labor board. The numerous lawsuits against the mass firings and funding freezes (click here for a complete list of all lawsuits against the Trump administration) are proving mostly successful, thus perhaps either leading Democrats to argue that legal checks against DOGE are working, or perhaps leading the Trump administration to begin pursuing a different route.
This different route would be something known as rescission. The Tax Policy Center has an explainer on the rescission process:
In the rescission process, the president sends the Congress a request to cancel specified appropriations that have not yet been obligated to fund the purchase of goods and services. The Congress has 45 days to consider—or ignore—the president’s request. If the Congress votes to approve the request or any portion thereof, the spending is cancelled. If not, the president must spend the money.
Notably, rescission requests cannot be filibustered in the Senate, thus providing Trump and Musk an entirely legal way to enact the cuts that the courts are currently striking down, and to do so without the need for any Democratic votes. Musk, who apparently did not know about the rescission process until he was informed of it by Republican senators on Wednesday, is now talking with Republican senators about making a rescission package happen. The Trump administration actually attempted to use the rescission process multiple times in his first term, so it really would not be surprising if they took that route again this time around.
The situation is changing by the day, and as such the outcome is difficult to predict right now. However, one thing for sure is that if there is a government shutdown over funding freezes, mass firings and DOGE, Democrats in Congress are going to need a lot of support from the grassroots. Back on February 3, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a letter to his colleagues that:
[A]ny effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner.
When Rep. Jeffries wrote that, I created a petition supporting him, and it has since become the first solo Bowers News Media/Wolves and Sheep petition to pass 50,000 signatures. If you add your name to the petition—which will not sign you up for any email lists other than Bowers News Media—as long as the petition is still relevant I will deliver it via email to Jeffries' office one week from today, March 13, on the eve the shutdown.
I think that Hakeem Jeffries will stick to his guns because true Americans see through the BS that Trump & his cronies spew and if it takes a government shutdown to prove they’re a bunch of a—holes, I’m all in!