A fast-approaching funding deadline has lawmakers squabbling over subsidies and spending, and Washington is teetering once again on the brink of a partial government shutdown as January 30th looms.
Talk of a shutdown is back because Congress still needs to pass funding to keep agencies running, and negotiations are stalled as the new year begins. The debate centers on expiring enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies and how to prevent premium spikes for millions of Americans. That disagreement is colliding with internal Republican divisions, making a straightforward funding package anything but simple.
Republicans control the House, and the pressure on GOP leaders to produce a path forward is intense. Speaker Mike Johnson has told his conference he wants the remaining appropriations wrapped up by the January 30 deadline, but getting fractious members to agree is a tall order. Senate leaders face a similar challenge balancing conservative priorities with the need to avoid disrupting services and paychecks.
From The Independent:
The Republican Congress is hurtling towards another self-imposed deadline, even after the House and Senate were unable to reach an agreement to avert impending health care premium spikes for millions of Americans due to begin January 1.
At the end of next month there lies another government funding drop-off when an agreement brokered in November to end the longest government shutdown in history will expire. While Congress isn’t likely to face another battle of quite that magnitude, the path forward for Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune is still tricky.
That’s because Congress still needs to come up with another spending bill to keep agencies open and basic services ongoing, a relatively simple prospect which it has proven repeatedly unable to manage. On both sides of the aisle lawmakers have withheld their votes for such resolutions this past year, either in the hopes of extracting political concessions or due to reservations about changes to funding levels for various agencies and programs.
The result: Paychecks for tens of thousands of federal workers and necessary parts of the welfare safety net become political footballs with even-increasing frequency.
January’s shutdown battle is not likely to meet the rancor of the fall, when a battle over expiring federal subsidies for health care plans on the Affordable Care Act’s public exchanges was waged by Democrats over October and November.
The politics are straightforward: Republicans must demonstrate they can govern and set priorities without ceding the power of the purse. Conservatives who favor spending restraint are right to insist on fiscal discipline, but the practical reality is that a shutdown hurts ordinary Americans and hands Democrats a messaging victory. That tension is fueling the current impasse in conference rooms and back-channel talks.
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro posted a video on X inviting Republicans to negotiate and criticizing them over infighting.
“I am the leading Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. That is the committee that dispenses federal dollars,” the lawmaker said. “But the Republicans control the Congress, and we must work with them to get things done. Right now, Republicans are not able to work with one another. They are shouting at each other in meetings, and they are calling each other out in the press. There is no plan to meet the January 30th deadline.”
And if we do not come up with one, if they do not come up with one, we could see another government shutdown. We need our Republican colleagues to get to work. We cannot do it without them. If we could, we would have done it months ago. But Republicans have been surrending government’s power of the purse all along. When Elon Musk took a chainsaw to federal agencies, Congress created by law, they let it happen. When the White House illegally blocked $5 billion in congressionally approved funds, they shrugged it off. Now, time is running out.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said this is different because the ACA subsidies expired, adding that Democrats are trying to work with Republicans to resolve the issue. That posture reduces the chance of a repeat of the fall fight, but it doesn’t erase the ticking clock. When subsidy disputes, internal GOP fights, and looming appropriations deadlines collide, a messy outcome becomes more likely.
Speaker Johnson and Senate GOP leaders say their goal is to pass appropriations by the end of January, but achieving that will require bridging factional divides and making tough choices. Lawmakers can either accept imperfect compromises that keep the government open or risk another shutdown that would disrupt paychecks and services. With the deadline approaching, the political and practical stakes are high and getting higher by the day.
