Shutdown looms as ‘unified’ U.S. Senate Dems oppose GOP’s stopgap spending bill

WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer appeared to announce Wednesday that a partial government shutdown will begin on Friday at midnight, when a stopgap spending law expires.

“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path drafting their continuing resolution without any input, any input, from congressional Democrats,” Schumer said during a brief floor speech. “Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House CR.”

Schumer, of New York, said Senate Democrats were “unified” on instead passing a stopgap spending bill that would fund the federal government through April 11, which he argued would give Congress more time to negotiate final agreement on the dozen full-year spending bills.

“I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday,” Schumer said.

While voters in November gave the GOP control of both chambers of Congress, the stopgap spending bill the House passed Tuesday cannot make it through the Senate without Democrats.

Republicans hold 53 seats at the moment, but moving past procedural votes requires at least 60 senators to vote in favor of limiting debate.

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul has publicly opposed the House’s stopgap spending bill, meaning that at least eight Senate Democrats would have to break ranks to move toward final passage.

Further complicating matters, the House left Tuesday for its weeklong St. Patrick’s Day recess and won’t return to Capitol Hill until Monday, March 24.

So were the Senate to amend the House-passed stopgap spending bill, which funds the government through the end of September, that chamber wouldn’t be around to vote on it before the Friday shutdown deadline.

And even if the Senate were to pass Democrats’ month-long stopgap spending bill as Schumer suggested, which seems highly unlikely, the House wouldn’t be around to vote to send it to President Donald Trump.

What happens in a shutdown?

The federal government has experienced its fair share of partial government shutdowns in the past when Congress and the president failed to come to agreement on time.

The executive branch has broad authority during such a funding lapse to divide federal workers up as either exempt, meaning they keep working, or non-exempt, who are essentially furloughed. The military is exempt.

Both sets of federal employees under federal law receive back pay after Congress and the White House reach an agreement to fund the government, usually with a stopgap spending bill.

But partial government shutdowns have sweeping impacts on federal operations and any funding lapse this year would have much broader repercussions than the one that lasted for well over a month during Trump’s first term.

That shutdown, which began in December 2018, didn’t impact the Departments of Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Labor or Veterans Affairs, because Congress had already approved the four full-year spending bills that cover their operations.

Lawmakers had also approved the Legislative Branch appropriations bill, meaning members of Congress and their staff were exempt from negative repercussions.

None of the dozen annual spending bills have yet to become law, meaning all the departments and agencies that make up the federal government would be affected.

Administration of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is generally not hindered by a shutdown, though the Trump administration had yet to post any contingency plans as of Wednesday afternoon.

‘Often difficult and rapid’ judgments

The only remnant of the Biden administration’s shutdown guidance that remained on the Office of Management and Budget’s website was a 17-page Q&A document that notes every “operational decision during a lapse in appropriations requires individual, and often difficult and rapid, judgments about facts and the law.”

“In preparing contingency plans for potential future lapses in appropriations, agencies should ensure that this analysis is undertaken carefully, but with a view towards allowing funded and excepted activities to continue in an effective manner,” it states.

The Internet archive maintains the agency-by-agency breakdown of how the federal government would have operated during a shutdown during the Biden administration. But those plans will likely be updated, possibly completely rewritten, by the Trump administration.

Shutting down the federal government is also disruptive to the economy.

A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the 2018-2019 shutdown “delayed approximately $18 billion in federal discretionary spending for compensation and purchases of goods and services and suspended some federal services.”

CBO estimated that shutdown reduced gross domestic product by $11 billion “lower than it would have been.”

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