Published March 6, 2025
While congressional leadership works to extend current government funding past its looming deadline, Democrats are threatening to prevent any stopgap in order to fight President Donald Trump and Elon Musk as they reform the executive branch. In other words, they’re threatening a shutdown. Shutdown fights are well worn and predictable, but if Republicans stick together, this is one from which they can come out ahead.
Congress has the power of the purse, which it traditionally exercises through a whole-year appropriations process. It’s messy and, given the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, bipartisan It has also been a while since Congress has passed regular appropriations.
Instead, Congress finds itself funding the government through continuing resolutions, or CRs. A CR, at its most basic, extends the date for which the prior funding levels apply.
As a CR runs out, Congress approaches a shutdown. For example, the current CR expires on March 14, so if Congress does not pass a new CR extending that date, the government will shut down.
Shutdowns rarely have winners and they always have losers. The most notorious examples were the Gingrich-led shutdowns that President Bill Clinton successfully hung around Republican necks in 1995 and 1996. A lesser-remembered example was in January, 2018, when Democrats forced a technical shutdown over DACA. Democrats caved immediately and the debacle weighed down ongoing immigration-reform efforts.
A shutdown played right is played to make the other side the instigator because it’s the instigator of the shutdown who loses.
This is so because, unlike in the regular appropriations process, the politics of a CR are rather straightforward. A CR just keeps the government going; it’s inertia. Large changes in spending or policy aren’t contemplated. Forcing a shutdown over a CR means affirmatively stopping the train as its cruising along, and voters can identify the guys with horses, guns, and bandanas.
Experience shows that shutdowns are unpopular. They generate tremendous uncertainty. Federal spending is almost 40 percent of GDP, much of which, during a shutdown, gets thrown into disarray with essential and non-essential designations, the Antideficiency Act, the promise of broad-based future catch-up payments, and so on.
Then there’s also malicious compliance, like shutting down parks and other popular services. If regular people are going to tolerate that situation, which harms them directly, it has to be for something worth the pain.
DOGE isn’t that. So far, Musk’s efforts have been quite careful not to go after government spending that will have affect the daily lives of everyday Americans. They have focused instead on targets like grant-money slush funds and inside-the-beltway personnel matters. In other words, they’re carefully goring Democratic oxen and leaving regular Americans alone.
If Democrats force a nationwide closure of government to protect the interests of their most committed government-worker and NGO constituents, all they will do is deliberately spread the pain of their base to the public at large. Regular Americans, who either don’t care about DOGE or somewhat support it, will get hurt by Democrats throwing a tantrum over it. It may very well get the public to care, but not in the way Democrats want.
Of course this will only be the case if Republicans allow Democrats to be the instigators.
Over the next two weeks congressional Republicans should make it clear that all they want to do is keep the government open. If they fall victim to the usual Republican-on-Republican violence about further reducing the size of government (always folly in a CR) or making extraneous policy changes, it will let Democrats shift any shutdown blame to Republican aggression. You can’t win a shutdown fight with a muddy message.
If congressional Republicans want to protect DOGE and Trump’s reform efforts, they should keep funding the government just the way they have been. If they succeed, DOGE continues apace. If they fail, then Democrats will take full ownership of a government shutdown and all that entails.
Trump likes to quote Napoleon. Republicans should recall the general’s dictum, “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” If Democrats want to shut down the government over DOGE, let them.
Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture Program, where he writes and speaks on issues relating to the law, the federal judiciary, and Congress. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: Per Curiam, and elsewhere.
