How Democrats Can Win This Shutdown Fight

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : It would force Trump to live with a Biden approved budget, and prevent Republicans from changing spending levels or imposing their ideological vision for the rest of the year.
46% : Making them monthly would thus force the Republicans to take regular votes on Trump’s refusal to spend funds on everything from cancer research to Meals on Wheels to implementing the CHIPS Act.
43% : So a continuing resolution would only protect those parts of the government that Trump and Musk want to keep.
40% : The CR will give $79 billion to the Department of Education, which the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate, $9 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency, which its new administrator, Lee Zeldin, plans to shrink by two-thirds, $47 billion to the National Institutes of Health, though much of its funding for research on diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s has been frozen, and $684 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, though its headquarters has been shuttered.
39% : So what happens next?The Republican fallback position, since they won’t stand up to Trump and Musk, has been to give up on a new funding bill, and to propose a long-term continuing resolution (or “CR”) instead.
38% : I would suggest another approach, one that would empower Congress without forcing Trump to do anything new—requiring the comptroller general of the United States (a nonpartisan official appointed by Congress) to make monthly reports detailing any recent presidential impoundments of congressionally appropriated funds.
32% : An argument for this would be that maintaining government funding on paper would help the plaintiffs who are trying to persuade judges to unfreeze the funds Trump and Musk have already frozen.
29% : But here is the problem: Large parts of the government are being shut down anyway, by Trump and Musk, without the consent of Congress.
27% : That would allow Democrats to assess how the court battles are playing out and to keep negotiating a government funding bill with guardrails to ensure Trump actually abides by it.
27% : In fact, Trump, Musk, and the ideologues around them are not primarily interested in cutting spending (like their authoritarian role models from Russia to Hungary, they’d likely be happy to see government checks from big social programs keep flowing).
12% : So far, the Democrats’ mantra has been that Trump and Musk are trying to cut Medicaid and other government programs to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

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