U.S. government set to shutdown tomorrow if no funding deal can be reached

Shed no tears: The Senate returns today, with a shutdown expected by the end of tomorrow if no plan for funding the government can be reached.

There are two plans on the table, but neither appeals to the opposing party.

“Republicans are proposing to extend current funding through Nov. 21 to buy more time for bipartisan negotiations over full-year appropriations bills,” reports The Washington Post. “They have rejected Democrats’ demands for health care changes along with the extension, arguing Democrats should accept the bill because it does not include any controversial policy priorities and would keep the government running.” Meanwhile, “Democrats have offered a counterproposal that would extend funding through Oct. 31 but which also includes several of their preferred policy changes,” showing they don’t understand the concept of a stopgap measure.

Politically, would this be bad for Republicans? Operating a slimmed down, skeletal federal government has been at least a rhetorical goal of the Trump administration, which has made drastic personnel cuts, axed big chunks of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and made noises about abolishing the Department of Education. Smaller expenditures have earned President Donald Trump’s personal ire: He has complained about the priorities of the Smithsonian, for example, saying he intends to cut it by roughly 12 percent.

These are, of course, very small tweaks to the overall federal budget. But it’s possible a partial government shutdown would simply give Trump more ideas for cuts worth keeping. In the past, government workers are simply furloughed and given back pay later, once the government reopens; this time, the administration has given “an additional directive to agencies, telling them ‘to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force’ notices to lay off federal employees,” per The New York Times. Democrats—and federal government employees who do pointless work or do important work poorly—stand to lose.

Russell Vought, the White House budget director who keeps a picture of Calvin Coolidge in his office, stands to gain. He served in Trump’s first term, then spent the Biden years biding his time, watching and waiting and preparing for the possibility of his guy retaking office, formulating plans for how to use an expansion of executive power to shrink the overall size of the government. Vought specifically hopes to set up “a legal battle over Congress’s power to decide how government money is spent, potentially creating a new legal precedent for the president to block spending on any programs and policies he dislikes,” according to the Times. To provoke such a battle, Trump is trying to cancel $5 billion more in foreign aid—called a “pocket rescission”—without congressional approval, authority he is claiming under the Impoundment Control Act.

Vought call the unelected bureaucracy a “cartel working behind closed doors.”

“We have a president who understands fully what is in front of him,” said Vought at the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month, referring to the administrative state. ( The whole thing is worth a read to understand his mindset.) “We would never say that Congress doesn’t have the power of the purse to appropriate, but the executive has the power to spend. And this was built on the foundation of what we learned and brought from the principles of the U.K., and that was an important notion: that Congress sets that ceiling, and presidents have the ability to spend less if they think it’s important, to prevent waste and abuse. And, literally, 200 years of presidents did this, from George Washington up until Richard Nixon.”

Vought continues: “And then at the lowest moment of the presidency, what do we have? We have the Impoundment Control Act that upends and says it is no longer a ceiling, it is a floor, you have to push all the money out the door. And that now orients the bureaucracy, who now have career civil service protections, to orient not from the president of the United States, but to the Congress that controls the purse strings. And so, we have a fundamentally different system. In some respects, it is a revolution that occurred over the last 100 years.”

It’s not yet clear how the Supreme Court will respond to the legal battle the administration is setting up, whether Congress really will shut down the federal government, and how exactly a shutdown under second-term Trump will look.

Scenes from New York: Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Eric Adams announced he would be ending his bid for re-election. This leaves the race to Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent.

Adams has been…actually pretty decent (and very good if you’re judging by the metric of personality). Ending his campaign with a long, emotional video set to Sinatra’s “My Way” is just classic Adams. He’s a little corrupt; he’s a little heartfelt; he’s a little embarrassing. I kinda liked him.

“This campaign was never about me,” he said in his video, referring to his original run for office. “This campaign was for the underserved, the marginalized, the abandoned, and the betrayed by government.” Adams has always understood that fundamental truth of politics: You must be oriented toward the people, and actually listen to the things they want, not attempt to get them to want whatever ideas are percolating in progressiveville. The former cop knew that people in the most underserved, crime-ridden areas of New York didn’t want “defund the police” talking points but actually safe subways they could use for their long commutes, and a corresponding police budget that enabled the police to do their jobs as best they could. He was a pretty normal guy: swaggy, corny, willing to be bribed by the Turks once he realized they were offering to give him nicer airplane tickets (who among us), somewhat ideologically and tribally flexible.

As for this election, “major change is welcome and necessary,” Adams said at one point, seemingly referencing his socialist opponent Mamdani. “But beware of those who claim the answer is to destroy the very system we built together over generations.” (He believes Cuomo to be “a snake and a liar,” a line he keeps repeating.)

QUICK HITS

• I can’t handle the Assata Shakur love affair. “Assata Shakur Dies at 78,” reads The New York Times’ headline. “Convicted Revolutionary Found Refuge in Cuba.” This sounds like she was convicted of being a revolutionary. She was not; she was convicted of killing a cop. Though I suppose she was a real trailblazer for women’s rights, if your idea of women’s rights is being the first woman to land on the FBI’s “most wanted terrorists” list. “Rest in Power, Assata Shakur,” wrote the Democratic Socialists of America on X. “The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades. The Cubans welcomed her and other Black Revolutionaries with asylum, and their solidarity and loyalty allowed Assata to live out her days in Havana. We vow to honor her legacy by recognizing our duty to fight for our freedom, to win, to love and protect one another because we have nothing to lose but our chains.” I’m sorry, what?

You’re not in chains, you went to fucking Oberlin https://t.co/xh1uoR8zy0

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) September 29, 2025

Meanwhile, the nation’s third-largest teachers union—you know, the ones tasked with educating your 6-year-olds—is apparently full of people who are beside themselves:

Rest in Power, Rest in Peace, Assata Shakur. ????️

Today we honor the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.

Assata refused to be silenced. She taught… pic.twitter.com/SsoIg7MU8w

— Chicago Teachers Union (@CTULocal1) September 27, 2025

• “Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?” asks President Donald Trump of what’s going on in Portland. In a way, that’s actually…the best question to be asking, oddly insightful. Agitators in Portland are attacking government buildings again, including immigration facilities, and Trump, weighing a federal response, is seemingly trying to get a sense of how bad the situation is. After speaking with Oregon’s governor and Portland’s mayor, he seems to be second-guessing his perception of how bad it is and waffling on sending in the big guns.
• At least four people have died so far in an attack on a Latter-day Saints church in Michigan. A man—40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford, an Iraq War vetera, with unclear motives—crashed a car into the building, then opened fire, then set fire to the church. Police also found rudimentary explosives at the scene.
• “Please spare us the media narrative that this prosecution ‘shatters norms’ at the Justice Department,” writes the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “Mr. Comey led an FBI that spread lies about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia in an attempt to defeat him in 2016. A member of his team lied to the FISA court to get a warrant to surveil an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. The Biden Justice Department prosecuted Mr. Trump in an attempt to disqualify him for a second term. New York prosecutors indicted him, and Attorney General Letitia James campaigned explicitly on a promise to find something to charge against him. Target the man, then find the crime. That is what Mr. Trump now wants Justice to do, but the Biden crowd was there first.”