The Unwanted Return of Government Shutdown Theater
With the U.S. government's fiscal year coming to an end on September 30, the next episode of Government Shutdown Theater has been scheduled. Politicians trying to stoke b...
With the U.S. government’s fiscal year coming to an end on September 30, the next episode of Government Shutdown Theater has been scheduled. Politicians trying to stoke both their fundraisers and their bases for support are already rehearsing their lines for their kabuki performance.
From the theater critic’s corner, the upcoming episode looks to be even dumber than the last one. That is really saying something because that episode turned into a total bust. In a sense, the stage show got cancelled before it even opened because Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and nine others backed down when they realized they stood to lose far more than they could ever win.
This time around, they intend to rewrite the script. It’s as if they see a chance to snatch defeat from the jaws of their previous, already almost-forgotten embarrassment.
Pushing for a Bigger Failure
Writing in The Hill, Al Weaver sees no good options for the shutdown party, which won’t stop them from pursuing the unwanted return of government shutdown theater:
Faced with President Trump’s refusal to negotiate, they can either cave after weeks of tough talk and support the Republicans’ spending bill, or they can hold firm against it and watch the government shutdown….
Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have been adamant that Republicans won’t find Democratic support without action on Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at year’s end — a demand Republicans have maintained is a non-starter.
On top of a lack of movement toward averting the shutdown, the administration indicated this week that it plans to make a potential funding lapse as painful as possible for the minority party.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought revealed in a memo days ago that the administration is planning mass firings of federal workers in the event of a shutdown, rather than just furloughing them as has been custom in the past.
The move was designed to pressure Democrats into backing the Republicans’ “clean” stopgap measure, which funds the government through late November, largely at current levels. But Democrats are not taking the threat seriously and believe that, given the administration’s actions in recent months, a shutdown is becoming a live option.
A live option, but not a very smart one. Especially since the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful bill this summer ensured that much of what President Trump wants in a budget deal has already been achieved. Because it has many essential parts, the federal government will keep operating without interruption. The negotiating leverage for the activists pushing for a government shutdown has been limited.
Bigger Failure, Bigger Consequences
Beyond that factor, a shutdown could very well turbocharge President Trump’s efforts to reduce the number of bureaucrats employed by the federal government, as The Week‘s Rafi Schwartz reports:
In a memo shared with multiple agencies on Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instructed agency heads to prepare plans for permanent mass layoffs of certain employees should the government shut down on Oct. 1….
This latest and “perhaps furthest-reaching” effort by the Trump administration to fire huge swaths of the federal government comes months after the White House’s Elon Musk-led DOGE enterprise yielded “mixed” results on that front, said CNN….
By continuing to agitate for a potential shutdown after the administration’s memo, Democrats are “eagerly marching forward into a box canyon,” said the National Review. Stuck between being in the minority and avoiding being tagged by the left flank of his party as a “man unwilling to ‘fight,’” Schumer will “likely have to concede and lose the fight in the not-so-distant future.”
The only thing that’s guaranteed in yet another staging of Government Shutdown Theater is that how it ends will not go well for those agitating for the performance. Whatever Academy Award-winning script they think they’re writing, the final product that hits the stage will very likely become the DOGE 2 sequel before it’s over.
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The Democrats are trying to guard their political alamo - the Congressional seats through the census. But looks like even that will collapse but later.