President Donald Trump and GOP leaders are confronting a trio of self-made crises as we enter a very big week for Republicans. On Tuesday night, Trump is giving his first address to Congress in five years.
1) Government funding expires in 11 days. Speaker Mike Johnson now says he wants a clean continuing resolution through Sept. 30 without trying to codify the cuts made by Elon Musk’s DOGE team. While this is a reversal from Johnson’s previous position, it lines Johnson up with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Yet Democratic votes will be necessary to pass anything.
2) European leaders are rallying behind Ukraine after Trump’s Oval Office blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday. With the Trump administration pulling back and potentially cancelling future military aid shipments to Kyiv, European nations are quickly trying to fill the void. GOP defense hawks are reeling, NATO’s future is in doubt and allies worldwide are openly questioning the United States’ reliability as a partner.
3) Trump will announce Tuesday – the day of his Capitol HIll address – whether he’ll move forward with 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada (Canadian energy imports would face a 10% tariff) plus another 10% tariff boost on imports from China. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that Canadian and Mexican officials have taken steps to cut down on migrants and drugs crossing the border, raising the possibility that Trump may impose smaller tariffs on two of the biggest U.S. trading partners.
Government funding. It’s getting closer to the March 14 government-funding deadline and there’s no resolution in sight yet.
Remember: This is the deadline we told you last year was a mistake and could interrupt Republicans’ plans to advance Trump’s agenda. The same funding deadline that the GOP congressional leaders said wouldn’t be a problem because they’d deal with it ahead of time. Of course, that didn’t happen. Now there’s less than two weeks until a shutdown.
The GOP leadership wants to pass a CR until the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. Their plan is to keep funding at current levels.
But Democrats want language in any funding bill mandating that Trump spend the money how Congress appropriates it. Trump has shown that he has no problem flaunting Congress’ spending priorities and senior Republicans refuse to give in on this.
There are a bunch of questions right now about what will happen on the shutdown front.
– Timing: Will Johnson put a CR on the floor this week? Some in the GOP leadership say that he could, although there’s no sign of that yet. We doubt it.
– How will Republicans react? Can Johnson pass a CR with only House Republicans? No, probably not. Will defense hawks freak out about a CR? The Pentagon hates CRs, so many of them already are. But Johnson and Thune note that Republicans’ reconciliation bill will give the Pentagon another $100 billion to 150 billion.
– Will Democrats bail Republicans out? This is the big question. Democrats have shown in the past that, despite their antipathy toward Trump, they’re not willing to hold back their votes when they are needed on must-pass legislation.
However, that was pre-DOGE. Layoffs of 7,000 workers from the Social Security Administration, layoffs at the VA, FAA layoffs while Musk is pushing to get a new Starlink contract out of the agency, angry constituents at GOP town halls – this is what Democrats are seeing now.
So House Democrats will wait to see if Johnson can pass a rule for a CR with GOP votes alone. Then Democrats will decide whether to vote for a CR. For their part, Senate Democrats will wait for the House drama to play out first.
Johnson has shifted his position on the CR over the last week.
In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that we wrote about Thursday, Johnson said he’d try to load up the six-month CR with provisions to account for Musk’s DOGE cuts.
Now Johnson is saying that he won’t seek to codify any of those DOGE cuts until FY 2026.
Appearing on Fox Business’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo,” Johnson said that Congress will “pass a clean CR to get us past FY25.”
More Johnson:
“And Maria, the exciting thing is FY26. The budgeting where we will be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse,” Johnson said.
On the one hand, this kind of talk – no DOGE cuts coupled with Johnson’s insistence that the CR needs to be bipartisan – should lower the temperature on a potential shutdown.
Yet it could cause problems inside the House Republican Conference. Some House Republicans say Johnson is funding the government with Democratic help and cutting no spending from last year’s Joe Biden-approved levels. Which is true. But that’s what Johnson has to do given how slim his margin is.
On the House and Senate floor: Senate GOP leaders are looking to squeeze Democrats with a procedural vote tonight on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. We don’t expect it to get 60 votes, but the issue was a prominent one for Republicans in various Senate races last year.
The Senate is also set to hold confirmation votes for education secretary nominee Linda McMahon and labor secretary nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer this week.
