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With the government shutdown well into its second week, President Donald Trump’s strategy to break Senate Democrats has become clear: Maximize the pain of the closure to force them into retreat. His administration is firing civil servants en masse, threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, and canceling billions of dollars in funding for states that voted for his opponent last year.
Yet with only a couple of exceptions, the party’s senators are holding firm—to the unexpected delight of House Democrats worried that their counterparts across the Capitol, whose votes are needed to reopen the government, might cave in the face of Trump’s heavy-handed pressure campaign. “I’m surprised, but I’m happy,” Representative Eric Swalwell told us. Like many of his House colleagues, the California Democrat had been bitterly frustrated when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer surrendered the last spending fight in March, making the current shutdown nearly a forgone conclusion.
Far from folding, Senate Democrats appear to be unusually united and even more emboldened with each passing day the government remains closed. They haven’t budged from their insistence that, before they will vote to end the shutdown, Republicans first must agree to extend health-insurance subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. “We know what we are fighting for. Folding is not an option right now,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington State, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told us.
[Read: How are we still fighting about Obamacare? ]
Instead, it is Republicans who are showing signs of strain, questioning their leaders’ tactics and, in one high-profile defection, calling on them to essentially meet the Democrats’ demands. At the White House, Trump muddied the party’s message during the shutdown’s first days when he told reporters that he wanted to make a deal on health care and was “talking to Democrats about it.”
The comments were news to congressional leaders in both parties, given that Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune had each declared that no negotiations over health care would take place before Democrats agreed to reopen the government. Republicans were also startled by a memo from Trump’s budget office suggesting that furloughed workers might not receive back pay, since it conflicted with a federal law that Trump himself had signed during his first term and which both Johnson and Thune voted for. “We’re a little less on the same page than we should be,” a White House official told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment of the GOP’s approach.
Trump has allowed his budget director, Russell Vought, to serve as the administration’s “bad cop.” In the days leading up to the shutdown, Vought had issued a warning that a lapse in funding would prompt the administration not merely to furlough federal workers deemed nonessential—as is standard in a shutdown—but to lay many of them off entirely. Soon after the shutdown began, Vought announced that funding for key infrastructure projects in New York—home to both Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—would be canceled (to ensure contracts are not based on “unconstitutional DEI principles”), as would energy projects (“Green New Scam funding”) in a litany of states that all happened to vote Democratic last year.
The administration initially made no moves to fire federal employees en masse, leading Democrats to believe they had effectively called the president’s bluff. (Some Republicans had also pushed back on the idea.) But this afternoon, after the Senate broke for the long weekend without reopening the government, Vought said the layoffs were starting. They “have begun and are substantial,” an official with the Office of Management and Budget told us, without offering details on exactly which agencies or how many people would be affected.
For Democrats, the administration’s escalation had already been baked in. “They want everybody to be afraid,” Murray told us. “Oh my gosh, he’s going to do this. Oh my gosh, he did that. Oh my gosh, he threatened that. But when you deny somebody that fear, you diminish their power. And that is what we think is absolutely critical.” The risk that Trump would use the shutdown to initiate widespread layoffs also carried less weight with Democrats because he had already cut the government deeply without congressional approval. “The threats would have been more powerful if he weren’t doing all of those things already,” Senator Adam Schiff of California told us before Vought’s announcement.
Although Democrats remain united at the moment, the party’s caucuses in the House and Senate could diverge. Jeffries has said Democrats in the House want to see a permanent extension of the health-care subsidies. Senate Democrats, however, might agree to a compromise short of that to end the shutdown, perhaps even one that relies on separate negotiations over health care. “I want show, not tell,” Swalwell told us, saying he wants a renewal to be written into legislation reopening the government.
An agreement that wins the support of most Senate Republicans would need only a handful of additional Democratic votes to defeat a filibuster. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is seen as a potential swing vote because she opposed a government shutdown in March, has been one of the few Democrats who has held informal talks with Republicans over the past week about a possible deal involving insurance relief. In an interview, she blamed both parties for a lack of real negotiations. “There are lots of ways to skin this cat,” Shaheen told us, “but you’re not going to do it unless you get people to sit down at the table and actually negotiate. And that’s not happening.”
Democrats have clearly succeeded, at minimum, in elevating the issue of health care. They have won an unlikely supporter in the ultra-MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has called on GOP leaders to extend federal insurance aid, in part because her family is one of millions across the country who would face a steep spike in costs if Congress fails to act. Republicans in swing House districts have also pushed to renew the subsidies, fearing an electoral backlash in next year’s midterm elections. And Trump, too, is now paying attention. The president has begun watching the polls, the White House official and an outside ally told us. And he is slowly growing leery of the impact of rising health-care costs, knowing that Republicans tend to be on the losing side of the issue.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the chamber out of session entirely, ostensibly as a means of continuing the pressure on Senate Democrats to approve a temporary funding bill House Republicans passed that could reopen the government. But as the shutdown has dragged on, some of his members have grown antsy. “The House needs to return to session,” GOP Representative Kevin Kiley of California posted on X. “It’s absurd to be cancelling weeks of legislative business when the government is shut down and Congress hasn’t enacted a budget in 19 months.”
If the two parties agree on anything, it’s that Trump—and perhaps Trump alone—can break the stalemate by instructing GOP leaders to cut a deal. He remains stung by coming out on the losing end of the lengthy shutdown in his first term. And aides wonder whether he’ll shift positions once he fully focuses on the shutdown; of late, he’s instead been fixated on a cease-fire deal in Gaza and National Guard deployments in American cities. Thune and Johnson have not moved off their positions, but both have deferred to the president’s wishes throughout the nine months of his second term. “They are afraid of him more than the policy they are fighting,” Murray said.
The political dynamic could easily shift. The fallout from Trump’s layoffs remains to be seen, and as our colleague Toluse Olorunnipa reported, other real-world effects of the shutdown will only escalate in the days ahead, ramping up pressure on both sides. But for now it is Democrats who are exuding confidence—in some cases to the point of bravado. “Every day gets better for us,” Schumer told Punchbowl News. Republicans said the boast displayed insensitivity to the many Americans negatively affected by the shutdown, and the Democrats we spoke with notably declined to echo Schumer’s sentiment. “There’s no glee in the government being shut down,” Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the House’s third-ranking Democrat, told us. “This isn’t about winning and losing.”
Gleeful or not, the impasse doesn’t appear close to a resolution. A party that averted a fight months ago is relishing its newfound resolve. When we asked Murray about the possibility that her Senate colleagues would tire of the standoff and reopen the government without a health-care deal, she replied instantly: “I absolutely do not see that happening.”
Illustration Sources: Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Annabelle Gordon / Bloomberg / Getty
