Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s defense of joining with Republicans to fund the government in March could come back to haunt him as Democrats careen toward a shutdown despite far-reaching consequences for the very Americans he previously argued would suffer from a lapse of funding.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo on Wednesday evening directing agencies to identify employees and government programs that could be terminated during a government shutdown, raising the costs of a shutdown for Democrats. Despite the prospects of mass firings appearing to justify Schumer’s concern about shutting the government down in March, the lead Democrat shows no signs that he will join with Republicans to fund the government as the party’s left-wing base demands a fight with the president.
“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare,” Schumer wrote in a post on the social media platform X on Thursday. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government.”
“These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as this week,” Schumer continued.
Schumer’s relatively cool response to the White House’s aggressive reduction-in-force plans is markedly different from his serious concern in March about the actions the Trump White House could theoretically take during a shutdown.
The OMB memo said employees who are in programs that have no current funding source or do not align with the administration’s priorities could see permanent job cuts during the shutdown. This reduction in the federal government’s workforce would be in addition to temporary furloughs that typically happen during a government shutdown.
Schumer led a small cohort of Democrats to advance a GOP spending bill and prevent a lapse in government funding, sparking an intraparty fight with top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Schumer, however, argued the costs of a government shutdown outweighed hits to his own political standing.
“The damage they [the Trump administration] can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do,” Schumer told the New York Times in an interview following his consequential decision to approve the March spending bill. “It can last forever. There is no off ramp.”
The lead Democrat similarly told The Wall Street Journal that plunging the country into a government shutdown would give the president and then-Department of Government Efficiency chair Elon Musk “a blowtorch — or five blowtorches — to destroy huge parts of the government.”
Congress is up against a Sept. 30 deadline to avert a shutdown, which looks increasingly likely as Senate Democrats refuse to support a House-passed funding plan offered by Republicans to temporarily fund the government. No meetingsare planned between Trump and top Democrats before the looming deadline.
Schumer has vowed to oppose any government funding bills that do not include more than $1 trillion in Democratic Party policy priorities in exchange for their votes. Democrats have demanded a permanent extension of expiring Biden-era Affordable Care Act health subsidies and a complete repeal of recent GOP Medicaid reforms, both of which are nonstarters for congressional Republicans.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN on Wednesday that Republicans would not allow Schumer to hold the government “hostage” with unrelated healthcare demands.
Government funding bills must obtain some Democratic support in the Senate due to the upper chamber’s 60-vote legislative threshold. Nearly all Senate Democrats blocked a “clean” stopgap measure to temporarily fund the government through Nov. 21 at current funding levels on Friday.
Democrats struggled to specify what they oppose within the spending bill when pressed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Schumer’s flip on the costs of a government shutdown for Democrats is not the only area of hypocrisy that Republicans have identified in the current funding showdown.
Republicans have also highlighted Democrats’ past opposition to threatening to shut down the government over unrelated healthcare legislation.
“There is a time and a place to debate health care, just like there is a time and place to debate energy policy and immigration and education—but not when the funding of the federal government, and all the lives that are impacted by it, hang in the balance,” Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said in 2013 amid Republicans vowing to shut the government down if Democrats did not agree to repeal Obamacare.
Murphy, one of the president’s most vocal critics in the upper chamber, has changed his tune in the current shutdown fight.
“We have to stand up for people whose lives would be ruined by these massive health care premiums, and then that we have no moral obligation to pay the bills for democracy’s destruction,” Murphy told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday. “So, if this budget doesn’t roll back at least some of the grave damage that’s being done to the rule of law, then Democrats have no obligation to support it.”
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