On Monday, Sept. 29, the U.S. Senate will reconvene from a short recess with less than two days remaining until they hit a midnight funding deadline. This cutoff threatens to halve both essential government services and the U.S. economy at large. Only days ago, President Trump suddenly cancelled a meeting with Democratic leaders in Congress, signaling his refusal to negotiate in order to pass another budget extension — and now, he’s threatening to permanently fire many government employees if his opponents don’t give in.
In the face of this Republican recklessness, Democrats cannot back off from their demands to save popular healthcare subsidies, reverse the calamitous Medicaid cuts resulting from the “Big, Beautiful Bill” and protect Congress’s constitutional authority to set the budget.
With the news full of stories of political violence and democratic backsliding, the economy already teetering and the Democratic and Republican parties alike being as unpopular as they’ve been in years, the addition of a government funding crisis over Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies may seem pointless, or even counterproductive, for opponents of the Trump administration. But Trump’s actions threaten to undermine not just the political foundations of our democracy, but the economic foundations of millions of Americans’ lives. Opposing members of Congress have a responsibility to use this rare moment of leverage to substantively oppose these unpopular overreaches and keep costs down for Americans, even if Republicans’ refusal to negotiate leads to a government shutdown.
The federal government has long had an appropriations process in which Congress approved a budget at the beginning of each fiscal year. But, only in the 1980s was it deemed illegal for government agencies to continue their non-essential functions during gaps when the previous year’s spending bill expired without agreement over a new one. Since then, government shutdowns have taken place intermittently at times of partisan division between Democrats and Republicans over government spending, suspending most functions of the many federal departments and causing hundreds of thousands of employees to go without pay.
Government shutdowns do billions of dollars in damage to the economy and disrupt essential services for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. They are a unique quirk of the U.S. system of government, and it would probably be best for everyone if current spending levels were simply continued automatically when Congress couldn’t pass a new budget in time.
However, one of the few forces still pushing Democrats and Republicans to work together is the fact that leaders who are too intransigent in budget negotiations will be blamed for devastating government shutdowns and lose political support. Since passing the yearly budget requires a vote of 60 percent of the U.S. Senate, more seats than either party has controlled in the past fifteen years, they do frequently have to negotiate. Usually, one party must make major concessions in order to get a funding agreement passed.
It isn’t always clear who will be blamed for a government shutdown. In 2013, Republicans were disproportionately held responsible for an unpopular government shutdown in which they attempted to block any budget bill that didn’t defund the ACA, which was only just launching at the time: Ultimately, Republicans’ negotiating position disintegrated due to bitter infighting between moderates and hardliners, and a multi-year budget deal was agreed to which reduced Republicans’ demanded spending cuts and left the ACA intact.
In the 2019 government shutdown, it was congressional Democrats who refused to pass funding for an administration priority after President Donald Trump demanded the inclusion of border wall funding in the new budget. Even though this time they controlled the White House and it was the Democrats blocking their priorities, Republicans were once again widely blamed for the shutdown as their internal disagreements spilled increasingly into public view. President Trump eventually conceded that Congress would not fund his border wall, signed a wall-free funding bill ending the shutdown and attempted to divert funding to barrier construction by unilaterally declaring a national emergency instead.
Yet Republicans actually gained seats in the House of Representatives in the next elections following both of these government shutdowns. It seems that the results of government shutdowns do not easily override the broader feelings of the electorate about the direction of the country and the incumbent party, though government shutdowns, even if unsuccessful, can raise awareness of a party’s priorities.
Currently, the Democrats’ primary demand is for Republicans to extend the increased ACA subsidies — ones that form a key part of former President Joe Biden’s healthcare legacy — past their expiration at the end of the year.
While the ACA was famously unpopular when Republicans shut down the government over demands to defund it in 2013, many Republican voters now rely on ACA to get by. In these difficult economic times, this tension has created division in the GOP and made further healthcare reform one of the Democrats’ most consistently popular policies. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies have lost credibility through their reckless spending cuts, priming Democrats to blame them if he indeed uses a shutdown to pursue legally questionable mass firings.
Republicans currently have very narrow majorities in both houses of Congress and have for years regularly relied on the support of Democrats to pass essential legislation that too many of their hardliners oppose on anti-spending ideological grounds. Already, Republicans have begun publicly blaming each other for their scattered messaging in the face of popular Democratic demands.
Meanwhile, experts believe that, if ACA subsidies aren’t extended by November 1st, the over 24 million average Americans enrolled in the program may see increases in health insurance premiums of up to 75 percent, making healthcare more expensive for everyone in the long run. For Democrats not to use their leverage to attempt to save millions of Americans’ healthcare and protect Congress’s constitutional mandate would be practically and politically irresponsible.
“For Democrats not to use their leverage to attempt to save millions of Americans’ healthcare and protect Congress’s constitutional mandate would be practically and politically irresponsible.”
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, Democrats have largely allowed Republicans to keep the discussion firmly centered on themselves in the media, who have been following something of an all-publicity-is-good-publicity approach. While America’s descent into fascism absolutely deserves all the attention it is getting and more, Democratic representatives in Congress should not worry that they are detracting from it by continuing to visibly fight for the policies their constituents rely on.
While opponents of the Trump administration should never make the GOP’s callous old mistake of openly angling for a government shutdown to disrupt essential services, they mustn’t go along with Republican obstruction of common-sense priorities in the service of an outdated sense of legislative “normalcy,” either. Democrats can’t back down — they need to stay tough in negotiations and obtain a final product they can market to the 2026 electorate as a substantive, common-sense victory, or at least show voters they are trying.
Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 is a transfer student who writes articles imploring others to call members of Congress because he’s been too busy attending BusFest 2025 and TrainFest 2025 on back-to-back weekends to call representatives himself.
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