Democrats have a ‘lot of soul searching’ before next funding fight

Congress is already looking to the next spending fight after a bitter culmination to the fiscal 2025 funding battle last week that took the threat of a shutdown off the table through September.

But that doesn’t mean Democrats won’t be looking in the rearview mirror after a bruising fight with Republicans.

Indeed, frustrated Democrats in both chambers say they’re hoping to use the divisive experience — which severed Democrats while securing a huge victory for President Trump and congressional Republicans — to guide future tactics in their effort to block the GOP agenda from becoming law. How they do it, though, remains a work in progress.

“The obvious question is, how do you avoid this same situation happening again? I don’t have the answer to that question,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a senior appropriator, told The Hill on Friday.

“Maybe this is a one of one,” he said, but he added that Democrats “have to make sure that we aren’t cut out of negotiations in the future, obviously, that’ll be a topic we'll have to discuss.”

Senate Democrats, most notably Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), drew considerable backlash from base voters last week for helping Republicans avert a shutdown ahead of a Friday midnight deadline. The spending bill was crafted by Republicans without any Democratic input, and the critics wanted Schumer and his Senate Democrats to kill the proposal with a filibuster — the single most potent piece of leverage available to the minority party.

The move stunned House Democrats, who had voted almost unanimously against the bill earlier in the week and expected Schumer and the Senate Democrats to follow suit.

“I thought the Senate was on board,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who was the third-ranking House Democrat for almost two decades before stepping down in the last Congress, told MSNBC on Sunday. “If you remember when … Leader Schumer announced that the votes were not there, I thought that this was the time for the whole country to focus on exactly who was where.”

Rep. Debbie Dingell (Mich.), who heads the Democrats’ messaging arm, echoed that message, warning that Democrats need to be on the same page for future legislative battles — particularly the coming fight over Trump’s tax, immigration and energy policies.

“Sen. Schumer sent out mixed signals,” Dingell told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday.

“People are angry, [but] we’ve got to move on,” she continued. “Reconciliation is coming up. We have got to be united as Democrats in making sure … we protect people from having their health care cut, Medicaid cut, Social Security cut, or Medicare cut in any way, shape or form."

The House lawmakers who voted against the GOP bill included more than two dozen “frontline” Democrats who face challenging reelection contests next year. The fact that those vulnerable lawmakers had taken a tough vote for the sake of party unity has only fueled the frustration of House Democrats who are wondering why they stuck their necks out if Schumer and nine other Senate Democrats had intentions of joining the Republicans to get the bill over the finish line anyways.

Some House leaders said the episode will force them to alter their strategy when the next high-stakes debate comes along.

“All of these experiences help shape our tactics, our responses,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said after it became clear that Senate Democrats were ready to cross the aisle to help pass the GOP bill.

“And now the new members who came into Congress are having their own experiences working with the Senate shaped in real time."

The legislation, signed into law by President Trump over the weekend, will keep the government afloat into early autumn, but cut non-defense funding by billions of dollars, while boosting spending for military programs.

Democrats have sharply criticized Republicans for jamming through what they’ve panned as a partisan, roughly six-month plan, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), that puts funding for programs in areas like health and education at risk. The passage also came after a Democratic effort for a short-term funding patch aimed at buying more time for bipartisan negotiations to strike a larger funding deal failed.

“It was easily avoidable,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said of the outcome last week. “All the Republicans had to do was let the 30-day clean CR happen and close out the nearly completely negotiated appropriations agreement.”

“The idea that [Republicans] were not fighting with us until the last minute to have our bills move forward after having reached agreement on spending levels, there was no reason for us not to do a short term CR and then bring forward the 12 fiscal year 2025 bills,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), another senior appropriator said.

“And I think a lot of trust has been broken that they are committed to this bipartisan process,” she added.

Others have also signaled there are more insights to be gleaned from last week’s events.

“How do you negotiate with Republicans going forward if they're going to pull the rug out?” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told The Hill.

“And again, this was, as we make the case, this is not a clean CR, it's a dirty CR that had huge selected policies,” he said. “Going into ‘26 definitely, needs to be a different plan. But I’m not sure how we even start that.”

For weeks, negotiators on both sides had been hopeful of striking a deal updating levels on all 12 annual funding bills for fiscal year 2025. But Democrats say those negotiations fell apart in late February, as Republicans began to move toward a long-term stopgap that would keep overall funding at mostly the same levels through September.

The shift came as both sides struggled to reach a compromise amid an intense, partisan funding debate over Trump’s spending powers. Democrats demanded assurances to prevent any bipartisan spending deal from being undercut by Trump’s ongoing measures targeting funding and programs that have already been authorized by Congress. Republicans, however, drew a red line around putting guardrails on Trump, as conservatives have cheered his efforts to shrink government.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), asked if last week’s outcome was avoidable, told The Hill on Friday “probably,” but added moments later that “lessons will emerge.”

“Let’s focus on the next one,” he said. “We got a lot of stuff coming up. The [Republicans] are going to run their traps on their reconciliation bill. You got to start working on FY ‘26.”

“A lot of soul searching about this, in particular with respect to the FY ‘26 budget and where we are when we get into, like September, but, anyway, a lot of battles between now and then.”

Congress has until Sept. 30 to craft and pass the next batch of government funding bills for fiscal year 2026, which begins Oct.1.

Republicans are bracing for the release of Trump’s proposed budget, which they expect sometime next month. GOP leaders are also working to ramp up efforts to craft legislation to enact key parts of Trump’s tax agenda through a complex process known as budget reconciliation. That process would allow Republicans to approve significant tax and spending cuts without any buy-in from Democrats, despite their slim majority in the Senate.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) had also previously signaled openness toward both sides continuing efforts to hash out some individual funding bills once the threat of a shutdown was off the table.

But the House GOP funding negotiator later acknowledged the difficulty in both sides pursuing a bipartisan spending deal to fund some programs in the current fiscal year, while noting last week that “it's going to get hard, because we're behind the eight ball.”

“I’m just listening to the members, and they kind of want to move ahead,” he said, though he added, “I certainly would still like to do something.”

“I just don’t know if it would get in the way of trying to get the reconciliation bill done. It probably will.”

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