House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is sending a warning to Republicans that next year’s spending bills must have Democratic buy-in, or the government will likely shut down.
“It’s my expectation that if Republicans try to jam a highly partisan spending bill down the throats of the American people here in the House we’ll reject it,” Jeffries said Monday during a press briefing in the Capitol.
With President Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill enacted, the Republican-led Appropriations committees in both chambers are charging ahead with a slate of spending bills for fiscal 2026. The deadline for passing those bills is Sept. 30. A failure to do so will lead to a partial government shutdown.
Typically, spending bills are bipartisan. But this year Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, is urging Republicans to ignore the policy wishes of Democrats and craft the most conservative spending bills possible to maximize the cuts to the federal government.
“The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan,” Vought told reporters last week at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
That advice confronts a central dilemma: While Republicans have the power to push partisan bills through the House, where legislation needs only a simple majority, they’ll have a much tougher time in the Senate, where the minority Democrats have the power of the filibuster. That means any spending bill will need 60 votes to pass through the upper chamber, necessitating the bipartisan buy-in Vought renounced.
Jeffries’s shutdown warning, therefore, leans heavily on his Democratic colleagues in the Senate holding the line against any partisan GOP bills.
“You have Trump administration officials, like the author of Project 2025, saying that we should walk away, as Republicans, from the appropriations process, which means they want to shut down the government,” he said.
It’s a strategy that didn’t work earlier in the year.
Facing a similar shutdown deadline in March, Jeffries rallied virtually his entire House caucus in opposition to a GOP spending package, which Democrats loathed because it slashed certain federal programs and excluded specific language requiring Trump to spend the money as Congress intended.
When the package went to the Senate, however, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opted against using the filibuster to block it, instead voting with Republicans to ensure it became law. The move infuriated House Democrats, from leadership on down, who are hoping history doesn’t repeat in the coming spending fight in September.
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