DOGE cuts complicate government funding talks and raise shutdown fears – CNN

Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are struggling with a key question as they stare down a fast-approaching deadline to fund the government: How do they fund federal agencies that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to dismantle?

Democrats insist that the bill to avoid a March 14 government shutdown fully fund all agencies and provide assurances Trump will spend congressionally appropriated dollars – the latter of which Republicans leaders say would tie Trump’s hands and is a non-starter.

But Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson are looking to the White House for clearer answers on how to write a spending bill that Trump would find acceptable and avoid a politically fraught shutdown in the first 100 days of full GOP control of Washington.

The president expressed optimism Thursday night, declaring on his Truth Social platform, “We are working very hard with the House and Senate to pass a clean, temporary government funding Bill (‘CR’) to the end of September. Let’s get it done!”

But Republicans are still uncertain whether Trump is willing to back a “clean” bill since it would still include money for the agencies he’s targeted.

Johnson has suggested Republicans could codify Musk’s cuts in the upcoming funding bills, but GOP leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees shot down that very idea on Thursday. Thune said congressional leaders were reviewing White House requests on certain language to include in the funding bill but was non-committal about whether it would provide money for agencies like USAID that the Trump administration is actively trying to kill.

“I don’t know the answer to that but I think you know where the administration is on that issue,” Thune told CNN.

By Friday morning, top Democratic spending leaders accused Republicans of “walking away” from the talks to keep the government open. The statement, which came from Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, said Republicans are “raising the risk of a shutdown.”

The calculation is complicated. Since Democratic votes would be needed in both chambers, Johnson and Thune need to decide how much to give in to Democratic demands all while catering to the whims of the mercurial Trump, who in his last presidency sent Washington into a 35-day shutdown, the longest in history, after undercutting a deal that congressional Republicans cut with Democrats.

And that has even some GOP hardliners asking the White House to clearly state its views.

“I think we’ve got to be very clear that we expect to see the results of what DOGE is doing and what the administration is doing,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas said. “We’ve got to see what the White House is doing. They’ve got to speak with clarity about what’s happening with respect to recissions or whatever they might do on spending.”

Democrats, too, have their own complicated path: They can dig in and try to impose guardrails on Trump, risking a government shutdown. Or, Democrats can cut a deal but risk being viewed as capitulating over their first real piece of leverage since Trump took power more than a month ago.

“It’s unacceptable,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN when asked about Johnson’s push to codify Trump’s cuts. “If Republicans want to pass it with their policy priorities, then they can vote for it.” Asked whether she was worried about being blamed for a shutdown, Ocasio-Cortez said: “No. Republicans have the majorities in the House and the Senate.”

But even top GOP appropriators don’t believe it’s realistic to enact cuts laid out by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

“I don’t see how that could work,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the GOP chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who warned that Republicans should avoid adding language to enshrine DOGE cuts as part of a stopgap funding measure.

Collins’ House GOP counterpart, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, also shot down the idea of using a stopgap funding bill to codify Trump’s cuts: “Honestly this has to be bipartisan. You can’t get it through the Senate playing partisan games.”

For Johnson, forcing a gambit on a Republicans-only package also comes with the risk that he’d need virtually every member to vote “yes,” and conservatives like Rep. Thomas Massie are clear they won’t fund programs DOGE has already slashed while others are warning they want increases in funding in programs like defense.

“I am not going to vote to fund the stuff that DOGE has found is waste, fraud and abuse,” the Kentucky Republican said, adding he’d be reluctant to vote for a CR.

Many conservatives have a record of never backing stopgap funding measures to begin with, raising the stakes that Johnson could roll the dice on a Republican-only plan that fails on the floor, forcing him back to the negotiating table with Democrats in the eleventh hour.

Rep. Andrew Clyde, a conservative from Georgia, warned that Republicans might be more open to a CR that includes DOGE cuts then they have been in the past.

“There’s a lot of things we’ve never done before that we seem to be doing,” Clyde said.

There’s another challenge for the speaker: Defense hawks in his ranks are pressuring him to increase defense spending in the upcoming package. They warn that simply keeping spending at current levels risks setting programs at the Pentagon back.

“If you don’t increase defense spending, they’ll be some Republicans that don’t vote for it because we know we have the national security of the United States at risk,” Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez said.

For now, Democrats are saying little about how they plan to handle the funding fight as Republicans settle their own strategy.

Behind the scenes, Democrats have pushed for language in any funding deal to restrict Trump’s ability to ignore Congress’ spending powers. But privately, some Democrats are wary of publicizing any hard demands that could allow Republicans to cast blame across the aisle. Others are also concerned that demands for new language to force Trump to spend Congress’ money could weaken their party’s ongoing battles in court under the argument that the power of the purse already rests with Congress.

Even so, Democrats insist that they have no reason to help Republican leaders, particularly Johnson, deliver votes for a funding deal when the GOP controls all of Washington. And many are adamantly opposed to Johnson’s proposed language to enshrine the DOGE cuts into law.

Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Long Island who represents a Trump stronghold, told CNN he believes Republicans would be blamed in a shutdown.

“No, the Republicans control everything,” Suozzi said.

The top Democrat on the House Appropriations panel, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, was dismissive of Johnson’s proposed language on DOGE. Asked about the proposal to include such cuts in government funding, she said: “I don’t know what they’re even talking about. I mean everyday it’s something.”

And she stressed that Congress had the power, not Trump, to determine which agencies are funded.

“By law, there’s a process. It’s called the appropriations process. We have the power of the purse. We keep the government open, we pass the bills,” DeLauro said.

CNN’s Ted Barrett, Annie Grayer, Alison Main and Sarah Davis contributed to this report.
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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/doge-government-funding-talks-shutdown-fears/index.html