The slow-motion shutdown of the federal government that has been going on for most of this year has accelerated into full closure, affecting 750,000 federal employees. Of immediate interest to anyone paying attention is how this situation comes to an end. Shutdowns are a unique form of asymmetric warfare, full of intrigue in how various actors stake out positions, maintain discipline, manage faction and constituent expectations, evaluate the strength of the opposition, etc.
From its inception, this newsletter has focused on how Congress might reshape itself into a more representative and effective legislature—one capable of setting policy on the strength of ideas. Often, the most effective way to explain the options available to congressional actors is to provide high-level analysis of timely developments that goes beyond the typical scorekeeping political coverage of Capitol Hill. The resolution of the shutdown will involve themes that we regularly engage with like member factions, party discipline, and the congressional-executive balance of power. The tick tock of shutdown politics, who said what about whom, and its potential influence on the midterm elections however, are of diminished interest because the stakes are much higher.
Those stakes, as they have been since the beginning of this administration, are whether Congress will permit the White House to rewrite the constitutional order to transfer ultimate authority in the spending of federal dollars to the executive. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has asserted this authority consistently to aggrandize presidential power by eliminating alternative power centers, including a federal bureaucracy operating pursuant to law, with the purpose of transmogrifying a slate of government programs established under more than 200 years of constitutional order. The President, meanwhile, treats his office like a protection racket, doling out money to friends (foreign and domestic) and withholding funds to punish dissent. The two came together Thursday with threats to cancel “Green New Scam” energy projects in states with Democratic governments – and millions of Republican voters.
Defending congressional constitutional authority wasn’t the terrain on which many in Democratic leadership in Congress chose to fight in this shutdown, or how the party generally understands it. Many congressional Democrats signed on to win concessions on ACA insurance subsidies. Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged that White House threats against Democratic-led states and the federal bureaucracy are strengthening Democrats’ resolve. The feedback loop from the horse race coverage of the Hill press and tactics crunching of the Beltway commentariat will focus attention on how the health insurance issue is resolved. The shutdown in those “false binary” narratives will be evaluated as a success or failure for Democrats based on those results.
This frame subsumes the more critical constitutional element of the shutdown, which some Democrats have taken up. It’s clear even to Republican appropriators that the White House is breaking appropriations law and that Democrats should have no confidence that it will implement what congressional negotiators agree upon. The CR proposal Democratic appropriators introduced in mid-September included some sanction of OMB overreach like outlawing further pocket rescissions, eliminating fast-track procedures under the Impoundment Control Act, and restoring emergency funding from last year’s full CR that the White House had shifted around. It’s the grossest form of political malpractice should any spending deal Democrats agree to fail to include terms to force executive branch compliance.
We suspect that more than a few congressional Republicans would quietly cheer a revitalization of Congress’s power of the purse and facilitate its coming to pass, albeit quietly and behind the scenes. Such a result in and of itself would be a major victory for Congress and those who serve in it. Making the quiet shutdown a political problem for the administration by turning up the noise and leveling the playing field is the last, best move available under the current circumstances.
These are the stakes to focus on. Without guarantees on the fidelity of the appropriations process going forward, Republican appropriators will remain on their knees. They will have to cajole the White House to follow through with what they have written down. They will have to return repeatedly to shake loose held up spending that has political salience to them as elected representatives. Rank-and-file Republican members will have to continue to go hat-in-hand for things like disaster relief, restoring federal grants, and resumption of funds for transportation projects. Especially for senior appropriators in the majority, this will be a humiliating process. Indeed, as the government is already operating under a year-long CR, it’s a humiliation they’re familiar with – and one that is getting worse.
The shutdown may have unlocked multiple pathways to halting the White House’s tyrannical conduct with federal spending. One resolution of the situation at the moment is that Thune peels off the half-dozen Democrats he needs for a “clean” CR. That group could make returning the power of the purse to Congress their price for their votes. It could be obtained as a rider on the appropriations bills to immediately follow.
Alternately, Democratic unity could give political cover to Republicans not willing to kowtow completely to Trump and Vought. The level of distrust is growing between Congress and the White House on the appropriations process, made worse by the Supreme Court’s acceptance of pocket rescissions as something the President can have as a treat. OMB can’t even give Congress a straight story on where current CR money is going. Frustration could turn to action for Republican appropriators taking their role seriously. In return for seemingly small concessions over the power of the purse, senior Republicans allow the CR to advance with a rider or in parallel legislation. Perhaps the healthcare language travels along as well.
These two scenarios look like mirror images of one another, just with a slightly different distribution of blame. The White House may not like it all that much, but should that happen, the shutdown politics becomes all about White House intransigence. In other words, the public opinion blame would become fully aligned with the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania who are in fact responsible for causing the shutdown.
We could also see the House belatedly come back into session and pass the three appropriations bills passed by the Senate with wide bipartisan margins, reopening those sectors of the government. The House right now could pass that three-bill minibus, H.R. 3944, and send the Agriculture, Military Construction-Veterans Affairs, and Legislative Branch Appropriations bills to the White House without need for further Senate intervention. They could also amend it further, but an overwhelming majority of the House never really wanted to enact the legislation it originally passed, just to send a message and hope like heck the Senate would fix it.
Democratic cohesion is shaping how Republicans are thinking about how to move FY 2026 appropriations bills after the shutdown. Thune mentioned last week that the minibus that includes a full year of funding for the legislative branch would move quickly, securing the near-term effectiveness of GAO. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole noted that the sixty-vote threshold in the Senate shuffles the factional politics of the House as House fiscal conservatives refuse whatever comes over. As a result, “Democrats will also be in a position to play a role in all 12 of those bills” for FY2026, he told Punchbowl. The post-shutdown process, in other words, could contain multiple opportunities for Democrats to take additional bites of the apple to reverse White House overreach. That happens only if they stand strong.
Democrats and institutionalist Republicans have another opportunity for substantive short-term change to restore congressional power of the purse when Congress considers another of those twelve appropriations bills, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, which funds the Executive Office of the President. Congress created OMB in 1970 and has had a significant role in shaping its role since. CRS identified 95 statutes that spoke to the office’s operational authorities all the way back in 1986, the last time it compiled such a count. If OMB cannot faithfully abide by the laws of Congress, if in fact it is trying to engineer the downfall of Congress, some or all of OMB’s authorities could be defunded or shifted elsewhere.
We cannot predict how the appropriations impasse will end, or when. But even as the quiet shutdown has become loud, the stakes are whether Congress writes itself a new lease on life or signs its own suicide note.
OVERSIGHT OUTAGES
As all eyes focused on the looming shutdown, OMB cut off funding for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) as part of the administration’s war on Inspectors General. CIGIE isn’t funded directly by Congress, but rather federal law allows the various inspectors general to transfer their unused end-of-year appropriations to CIGIE for its operations. OMB is stopping this transfer.
Oversight.gov, CIGIE’s repository of inspectors general reports and whistleblower portal, and at least 14 other inspector general websites went offline. CIGIE provides professional guidance to 72 independent IG offices across the federal government. OMB also refused to release funds to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which operates inside CIGIE. Congress had extended funding for PRAC through 2034.
The decision came on the heels of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s announcement of his desire to weaken inspectors general in the armed forces, requiring offices to assess the credibility of those coming forward with complaints within seven days and making investigations of individuals more difficult if they may affect their service record or promotion schedule. The purpose is to undermine the ability of IG to investigate and reach conclusions on matters drawn to their attention.
These decisions reflect the contempt with which the Trump Administration holds independent oversight, claiming inspector generals are themselves corrupt. It fired 19 IGs in January and replaced them with partisan allies.
Senators Susan Collins and Chuck Grassley, who led creation of CIGIE in their chamber in 2008, wrote to OMB Director Russell Vought last Monday requesting information about why the offices were shuttered and on what legal authority it made the decision as it was “contrary to congressional intent.” The letter prompted OMB to release PRAC’s withheld funds, but Collins and Grassley reiterated their desire to see CIGIE funded, too.
While oversight.gov is offline, the Program Integrity Alliance’s GovQuery website offers an alternative source of IG reports and recommendations.
CONGRESS.GOV FORUM
The Library of Congress hosted its annual public forum focusing on congress.gov on September 30, allowing legislative branch organizations contributing data to the site to provide updates and the public to ask questions. More than 300 people attended this year’s event, and representatives from CRS, the Library of Congress Law Library, the House Clerk’s Office, GAO, the Secretary of the Senate’s Office, and GPO joined the congress.gov presenters.
We will have a full write up on the Congressional Data Coalition’s website in the near future.
MEMBER PRIVACY VS THE PUBLIC’S RIGHTS
The Senate passed Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz’s self-styled congressional security bill that will allow members of Congress to demand website publishers remove a wide range of personal information about them, their family members, their staff, and former members of Congress and prohibits data brokers from selling such information. The bill’s exceptions for First Amendment activity like reporting, unfortunately, are insufficient to allow public watchdog organizations, journalists, and the public from investigating or commenting on potential corruption, member conduct, or abuses of power. Even validating that a member lives in their district and not, for example, in a memory care facility, would be made more difficult. The data broker section of the bill, meanwhile, would not actually accomplish what it intends.
The measure passed after Sen. Cruz denied unanimous consent to Senator Ron Wyden’s bill to extend the bill’s data broker prohibitions to the general public and another to extend similar protections in the Cruz-Klobuchar bill to state and local elected officials, judges, and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Tech Crunch has the details.
Congressional security is an incredibly important issue. Passage of the Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations bill would make some progress towards addressing that issue. The Klobuchar-Cruz bill, however, will do little to improve congressional security but will exact a significant cost on congressional integrity.
ODDS AND ENDS
Oracular insights? Rep. Cleo Fields of the House Financial Services Committee bought between $80,000 and $200,000 shares of Oracle days before the White House announced it was handing control of TikTok’s U.S. spinoff to the company.
Balanced Budgets. We’re not supportive of the idea of a balanced budget amendment, but Americans for Prosperity’s Kurt Couchman makes a comprehensive case for an improved version of the one that nearly was approved in 1995.
New Congress podcast. The ever-engaging former Congressional Management Foundation president Brad Fitch has started a new podcast via the Sunwater Institute, exploring rebuilding congressional governing capacity. His first guest is former congresswoman Cheri Bustos.
Feeling old: “The last government shutdown happened in 2018, when I was a freshman in high school,” notes Punchbowl’s Zach Bradshaw.
The First Branch Forecast is published by the American Governance Institute, with Chris Nehls as lead author and Daniel Schuman as editor.