The country is left waiting while legislators act like children, daring each other to blow up a train that is already heading toward the cliff.
We are once again on the brink of a government shutdown because Congress insists on turning the most basic housekeeping chore into a hostage drama.
Funding runs out at midnight on September 30. Without action, appropriations lapse, resulting in a government shutdown. I have learned over the years that a government shutdown is counterproductive on many levels. It certainly doesn’t serve the cause of better governance and smaller government.
The most infuriating thing about all of this is that it isn’t about the budget for all of FY 2026. It’s simply about buying time so that appropriators can negotiate that budget. Yet there is a vehicle to do exactly this: the clean continuing resolution passed by the House.
The clean CR, put together by House and Senate Republicans working with President Trump, extends funding for seven weeks at the exact levels already set under President Biden and extended under President Trump earlier this year. Over at the Economic Policy Innovation Center, Brittany Madni points out that Democrats are trying to pretend that the House CR isn’t really “Biden spending levels,” even though legislative history makes it obvious that it is. As she shows, both the December 2024 CR signed by Biden and the March 2025 CR signed by Trump carried forward the FY 2024 Biden minibuses. The numbers are Biden’s. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. As Madni notes, only a single Democrat in each chamber, Representative Jared Golden (D., Maine) and Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.), broke ranks and voted yes.
It also means that these are the same spending levels both parties accepted in March. If these numbers were fine then, they are fine now. As an aside, I agree with my colleague Jack Salmon that these numbers are far from ideal in that they are evidence of a Congress that doesn’t understand the dire fiscal impasse we are heading toward. But, unfortunately, the best responsible option isn’t on the table (whether it will ever be on the table is a question for another day). In that universe, the second best will have to do.
Yet Democrats in the Senate blocked the clean CR because leadership wants to leverage the deadline into a demand for an additional $1.5 trillion in permanent spending. They want expanded ACA subsidies and various welfare expansions. None of this has anything to do with keeping the lights on, and it only exacerbates our perilous fiscal situation.
So what are we left with? Congress could avert a shutdown tomorrow. It could extend funding at levels that both sides have already endorsed and get back to arguing about the real FY 2026 appropriations. Instead, Democrats are stonewalling in hopes of forcing through a giant new entitlement expansion. Republicans are stuck trying to explain that “clean” really does mean “clean.” And the country is left waiting while legislators act like children, daring each other to blow up a train that is already heading toward the cliff.
Oh, and it wouldn’t be the Trump administration if there weren’t threats to permanently fire agency employees over this mess, which again has nothing to do with averting the shutdown.
Aren’t we all tired of this nonsense?