The lights could yet go off on January 30.
Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
There’s a lot of conflict in Congress to begin 2026, but the odds of another government shutdown — which could happen when stopgap spending authority runs out on January 30 — have been dropping. The trigger point for the long shutdown that began in October, the deadline for extending Obamacare premium subsidies, has come and gone, and while all Democrats and some Republicans still want to resurrect them, the issue isn’t time sensitive in quite the way it was. Plus, Congress is actually making progress on regular spending bills covering agencies till the end of the year, which could make the scope of government operations vulnerable to a shutdown significantly smaller. Beyond that, midterm elections are now less than a year away, and they will provide Democrats with the most important opportunity to check Donald Trump without interrupting vital government services.
And so, as NOTUS reports, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been putting out the word that January 30 will pass without too much drama:
Days into the new year, congressional Democrats are livid over a litany of issues, including President Donald Trump’s unilateral invasion of Venezuela, stalled action on health care and, most recently, an immigration agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis. But they are split on how to fight back.
With another critical government funding deadline on Jan. 30, Democratic leaders don’t appear willing to leverage their votes for spending bills in exchange for action. In fact, they appear to be openly forecasting there won’t be a shutdown at all.
But this mind-set was developed before Trump decapitated the Venezuelan government and asserted “control” over that country while repeating threats to attack Mexico and Colombia and acquire Greenland. And it’s also before an ICE agent shot and killed a motorist in Minneapolis and the entire Trump administration doubled down on aggressive law-enforcement deployments and treated protesters as “domestic terrorists.” Now the rage of Democratic activists at Trump is bubbling up from its steady boiling state into geysers of fury, and the last thing Democrats in Congress want is to again let them down and provoke their wrath. And a few leading Democrats are wondering if an end-of-January interruption of funding might be in order after all, suggests NOTUS:
“We’re about to have the DHS budget before Congress,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Senate Appropriations Committee member, said Wednesday. “And it’s clearer than ever that Democrats can’t support this budget if there aren’t constraints on the growing illegality of DHS, and it appears the lethal illegality of DHS.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, another Appropriations Committee member, said that “nobody wants the government shut down,” but “it’s going to be important that Trump and his administration work on a bipartisan basis to address a lot of the issues.” He also cited the DHS budget as a point of concern.
It’s worth remembering that funding for DHS, which supervises ICE, and for the Department of Defense (or as Trump and Pete Hegseth call it, “War”), which executes Trump’s bellicose global designs, will almost surely be included in the next stopgap spending bill that has to be passed by January 30 to keep the government humming. So it could very well be the target on multiple grounds for Democratic protests and demands both within and beyond Congress.
As that potential choke point approaches, the mood among congressional Democrats may become a lot darker, particularly if the most recent administration outrages at home and abroad are just the beginning of many reminders that the 47th president is a dangerous would-be tyrant. Will they and “the base” remain patiently focused on the midterms? Or will Democrats feel the need to put sand in the gears of the machinery of government in the confident expectation that the party controlling Washington will get the blame for the ensuring disruptions of programs and services?
Right now, you’d have to bet both parties will find a way to avoid another shutdown even as they gird their loins for a vicious and competitive midterm election. But if Trump continues to run wild, and his allies in Congress continue to enable him, all bets could be off until the government is refunded for the rest of the year and the campaign trail takes over.
