At this point, it looks like Senate Democrats are eagerly marching forward into a box canyon by intending to filibuster a spending bill and force a government shutdown.
President Donald Trump’s administration instructed federal agencies Wednesday night to prepare for mass layoffs if the government shuts down Oct. 1, after federal funding runs out.
The memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget directs agencies to consider firing employees working on any program that is not funded by another law, such as Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted in July, and which does not align with the president’s priorities. Once government funding is reinstated after a shutdown, agencies should revise their plans to keep only the smallest number of employees necessary to legally operate, the memo says.
Democrats cannot say they were not warned. Here in the Corner, back on September 8:
A federal government shutdown is a mild annoyance at most to many Americans who work in the private sector. A federal government shutdown can be a major financial burden on government employees, depending on how long it lasts.
Schumer and congressional Democrats got into a government shutdown fight with President Trump in late 2018 and early 2019. It was the longest in U.S. history, at 35 days.
Do you envision Trump making significant concessions to ease the pain and suffering of federal government workers? No, I don’t, either. Schumer and the Democrats will have gotten themselves into a high-stakes fight with Trump where one of the party’s key constituencies — government workers — feel the most pain, and it gets worse the longer it drags on.
Right now, a whole bunch of Democrats are spitting mad at Chuck Schumer because they feel like he isn’t “fighting” enough, even though Schumer’s approach to Trump has been largely shaped by the fact that he’s only got 47 votes, and on any given day, John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, Peter Welch, or some other Democratic senator might not be in attendance. But because Schumer doesn’t want the progressive grassroots to be mad at him, or think of him as man unwilling to “fight,” he’s going down a road where he’s likely to have to concede and lose the fight in the not-so-distant future.
By the way, do you think Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger, running in a state with a lot of federal government workers, wants there to be a long government shutdown, a bit more than a month before Election Day? No, I don’t think so, either. Sure, most polling shows Spanberger comfortably ahead, but no candidate wants a giant complication in the lives of Democratic voters in the final weeks of the election.