What You Need To Know
BACKGROUND: FUNDING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT 101
Every year, Congress goes through a process of writing bills to fund the federal government for another fiscal year—a vehicle for defining policy and budget priorities across agencies and programs. The Constitution gives Congress this “power of the purse” to shape federal spending, and the president is required by law and by the Constitution to faithfully execute the laws Congress enacts.
Republicans hold majorities in the House and Senate—but funding bills (called “appropriations”) must clear 60 votes in the Senate to proceed, so Democrats have real leverage in this fight. If Congress doesn’t pass bills to fully fund the government before current funding lapses on September 30th, a shutdown ensues. Congress alternatively has the option to pass a short-term fix called a “continuing resolution” or CR, which would fund the government under a temporary agreement while bipartisan negotiations on appropriations continue. But a CR still requires 60 Senate votes to proceed.
A shutdown would be devastating—and Republicans know that. During shutdowns, crucial programs and services are frozen or reduced to a crawl based on what the administration categorizes as “essential” or not, and federal workers are furloughed without pay for the duration of the shutdown. Republicans know it always looks bad for the party in power to fail to govern and keep the government open, so they’re using the threat of a shutdown and how it would hurt people as a bargaining chip to try to compel Democrats to accept a garbage deal.
WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE LAST GOVERNMENT FUNDING FIGHT?
We have all lived a thousand lifetimes since March, so let’s recap quickly. Congress passed a continuing resolution in December 2024 that funded the government through March 14, 2025. Ahead of that March shutdown deadline, Republicans put forward a partisan CR chock full of MAGA priorities and which gave the president new power to decide how taxpayer dollars are spent.
What was in the Republican CR?
- A blank check to Trump and Elon Musk to continue their coup. The CR lacked specific funding directives for key programs and priorities like appropriations bills normally have. For an administration that had already proven it was more than willing to defy clear congressional intent, this basically meant Congress handed Trump & Musk slush funds to continue defying the law and the courts.
- Slashing programs that millions of Americans rely on for their health, safety, and economic security. Cut $13 billion dollars in domestic spending for things like rental assistance and medical research, codifying harmful DOGE cuts that are a direct attack on working families, the economy, and the services everyday Americans rely on.
- Supercharging Trump’s mass deportation machine and defense budget. Boosted military spending by $6 billion and funneled hundreds of millions toward what ICE calls “Amazon Prime for human beings”—Trump’s deportation machine that terrorizes immigrant communities, kidnaps our neighbors with no due process and deliberately violates constitutional protections, and outsources human rights abuses to foreign governments.
Federal employee unions, litigators fighting Trump in court, outside advocates, House Democrats, many Democratic party insiders, and Indivisible were all in lockstep—passing this bill would be worse than a government shutdown. It offered Trump and Musk carte blanche to continue their administrative coup; in fact, Trump secured GOP hardliners’ support for the CR by explicitly saying “don’t worry about the funding levels, we’re going to cut all of these programs anyway.” A full-on admission of the intent to violate the Constitution.
All House Democrats but one voted against the CR; many swing-seat Dems pleaded with their colleagues in the Senate to reject it. Advancing spending bills in the Senate requires clearing a 60 vote threshold for “cloture,” meaning Republicans needed 7 or 8 Democrats to vote to allow their coup-enabling bill to advance—Democrats had rare leverage here.
But instead of using their leverage to oppose the bill, Minority Leader Schumer and nine other Senate Democrats decided to fully surrender and voted with Republicans to advance their budget. Schumer announced that fighting back isn’t worth it and encouraged his caucus to allow the Trump/Musk CR to go through. This was nothing short of a bumbling mess, with mixed signals and missed opportunities along the way, and winding up with Schumer going against the vast majority of his party to fully capitulate to Trump. The leading Democratic Senator on the Appropriations Committee, Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA), was reportedly stunned by Schumer’s surrender and said on the Senate floor that “CR” in this case stood for “complete resignation.” This wasn’t just disappointing—it was an unacceptable betrayal. A minority leader who is unwilling to fight back against fascism is a weakness our democracy cannot afford.
With the overwhelming support of Indivisible group leaders in New York and nationwide, Indivisible called on Schumer to resign as minority leader so someone willing to actually lead the opposition can take the role. We stand by that demand and firmly believe that this funding fight is a major moment for the Democratic Party.
CURRENT STATE OF PLAY ON GOVERNMENT FUNDING
SO much has happened since March 14, 2025—and it’s all swirling as the funding fight looms:
- Trump & Vought have continued to quickly consolidate power and rejected attempts by even congressional Republicans to rein them in. The ink was still drying on the CR when Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins (R-ME) wrote to Trump and Vought to complain that they had illegally frozen funding provided by it. Federal courts and nonpartisan government watchdogs have repeatedly found violations since Trump’s inauguration, from agencies delaying Head Start funding to canceling NIH grants to withholding infrastructure funding for schools. In fact as of June 3rd, Trump and Vought had stolen more than $425 billion dollars of federal funding from families and communities – though it’s been hard to keep track since Vought took down the website that provides detailed data on federal spending changes. The administration is even straight up incinerating food and medical supplies like contraceptives that had already been paid for but Trump chose to literally burn rather than distribute. Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse!
- Republicans have proven again and again that they can’t be trusted to negotiate and hold to bipartisan agreements. After embracing the help of Democrats who caved to allow passage of the March CR, Republicans turned around and unilaterally clawed back funding on a party line vote for programs covered by that CR.
- Republicans are using the reconciliation process to force through extreme cuts on a party-line basis. Reconciliation is a way for Congress to make limited changes to the federal budget requiring only a simple majority vote in each chamber. In July, Republicans enacted the Trump billionaire tax scam (the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”) which slashed trillions of dollars from Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP to pay for more than $5 trillion in tax breaks for the ultra-rich. Now Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republicans are saying they’ll take up additional reconciliation bills this fall to force through even more cuts with Republican-only votes.
Amidst all of that, Congress is debating government funding bills ahead of the shutdown deadline on September 30th:
- In the House, Republicans are pushing forward partisan spending bills with massive cuts to programs people rely on, almost 300 poison pill riders, and other gifts to wealthy backers & MAGA loyalists.
- In the Senate, Democrats have helped Republicans pass less extreme versions of some bills without poison pill riders, though this has unsurprisingly not resulted in some magical well of bipartisanship.
- As of September 15, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have announced that Democrats will not vote for a partisan spending agreement that continues Trump’s healthcare cuts. This is a welcome move—and now we have to make sure they hold the line, and vote against any MAGA budget that fails to meaningfully constrain Trump’s illegal weaponization of the budget to rob our services, militarize our cities, and terrorize our communities.
The reality is that Democrats know extremist House Republicans will never agree to the Senate’s bipartisan bills. We're yet again careening toward a time-bound continuing resolution being Congress's only way to avert a shutdown. Normally, a CR continues previous funding levels, which in this case would mean extending the slush funds of the March CR. Democrats should be willing to pass a one-week CR to allow time to negotiate a better deal, but a longer-term CR—especially one that fails to remedy the defects of the March CR—would be capitulating to Republicans’ dysfunction, corruption, and cruelty.