Last Friday, Congress passed a Republican-led spending bill that averted a government shutdown. It cleared the final hurdle when the Senate approved the bill 54-46. That was after nine Democratic senators, including the minority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, voted with Republican senators to advance the bill, which had narrowly passed the House of Representatives.
What the Senate passed and President Trump signed on Saturday wasn’t your typical one-year budget bill but rather a continuing resolution that only keeps the federal government funded through the fall.
Political science professor Jacob Smith, Ph.D., sat down with Fordham Now to explain what happened and how this threat of a government shutdown differed from others in the past.
Q: How would you describe what just happened on Friday?
A: Under the law, Congress is supposed to create a budget every year. Part of why that doesn’t really happen anymore is because you need 60 votes to pass a budget, and that’s just very difficult to get. You have a system that was designed with the idea that there wouldn’t be the same sort of level of polarization and partisanship there is today.
Congress hasn’t gone entirely through that sort of process in decades as a result, so what ends up happening is they pass these continuing resolutions to keep the government running.
A continuing resolution says we’re doing the same thing as before for a certain period of time, plus or minus some particular changes. Continuing resolutions might be two months, weeks, or sometimes even just a few days to work on things, but the continuing resolution that was just passed on Friday goes for six months, until the end of September. (This is not to be confused with budget reconciliation, which is a separate funding process that Congress undertakes periodically.)
Q: How was this one different, besides the six-month length, which was set by Republican congressional leaders?
A: There have been changes in continuing resolutions in the past, but not on the scale of the one that was passed on Friday. In this one, there was an increase in defense spending and about $13 billion in cuts to non-defense programs. So it was not a “clean” continuing resolution. But some of what’s different is what’s going on with the executive branch and Elon Musk’s DOGE and cuts related to that.
What makes it tough to compare this to the past is that in the past it also was much more of an expectation that the executive branch would follow what was in the continuing resolution in terms of spending. If Congress said we are spending $10 million on this program, then the executive branch would spend $10 million on that program. It’s not clear that’s what will happen now.
Q: When you take stock of the events leading up to the vote and then the way that a shutdown was averted, what are the conclusions that you’ve come to?
A: I think there was more of an expectation that the Republican-backed spending bill wouldn’t pass the House, given the close margins there. But it did. So I think in the Senate, Chuck Schumer was caught flat-footed in not expecting that.
On the Democratic side, there was a lot of internal debate about who would be blamed if there was a shutdown. There was a poll last week from Quinnipiac that suggested that either Trump or Republicans in Congress would probably be blamed, but that can always change over the course of a shutdown.
There were questions raised by some Democratic senators about what DOGE would do if there was a government shutdown. More broadly, there was not a coordinated strategy on the Senate side. All the House Democrats but one voted no, so it was much more unified. On the Senate side, there was a lot of division.
Q: Now the bill expires in six months. Do you expect we’ll go through the same thing all over again in September?
My guess is that there’ll be a debate about it again in September and that it’ll be coming up right against the deadline. In 2013 when there was a shutdown, it was right after [the start of the fiscal year on]October 1, and in the first Trump administration, when there were shutdowns, there was a continuing resolution passed at the end of September that expired around Christmas time. So, I imagine we’ll go through this again.
