New York Senator Chuck Schumer said on Thursday that he and a collection of other Democrats will vote to allow a preposterously damaging Republican budget bill to move forward, breaking with other members of the party in order to avert a government shutdown he says would be worse than the alternative. Some of the federal employees that will be directly affected by a shutdown had other thoughts.
“I don’t get paid if there’s a shutdown but shutting the government down and putting up a fight is preferable to giving in,” said a source who works at the National Institutes of Health. “Chuck Schumer just gave all federal employees the bird and told us no help is coming from Congress.”
Though there are more than two million federal employees and of course opinions will vary widely, there is a deep seam of anger emanating from a number of agencies that Splinter heard from on Thursday evening. “Every single one of my colleagues supports a shutdown. Too many people are not paying attention and we need to get through to them,” said a source inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “We need the public to understand just how bad this is and how much worse it will get for them and the services they rely on if we don’t stop this now.” The source called back to the 2019 shutdown, the longest in US history at 35 days, and how much the public suffered for those weeks and months afterward “while we tried to crawl out from under the mess.”
Schumer has said that while the Republican budget bill is “a terrible option,” shutting down the government would hand more power to Trump. This is… a tenuous claim, given all that has been going on since he took office.
“The shutdown will impact me directly. I am in favor of voting no on cloture and no on the Republican, poison pill-packed CR,” said a source inside the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who said they have called their senators multiple times this week to express that view. “A vote for cloture is a vote for the CR. If the CR passes, among other things, vets and the VA are decimated, and billions are thrown at [border czar] Tom Homan. None of this makes sense to me. If you don’t fight, you can’t win.”
Many federal employees have experience with previous shutdowns, which helps guide their opinion and action now. One source at HUD told Splinter that those who made it through the 2019 shutdown have been sharing tips regarding financial preparation for weeks at this point. “We know what to do and we will stick together,” the source said. “We just need Congress and the public to stick by us.”
Some of the details of the Republicans’ spending bill have specifically led federal employees to call for its outright rejection. For example, the bill would lead to an astonishing $1 billion in budget cuts to the Washington, D.C. municipal government. “If the Dems allow the CR to pass they’re totally disregarding all DC residents (many of which are federal employees) who pay taxes but have no representation,” said a source inside the Department of Health and Human Services. “Everyone I know in my office was hoping the Dems would grow a spine and shut the government down.”
The Senate faces a Friday midnight deadline to pass a funding bill, with a vote now likely in the afternoon given Schumer’s and several other Dem defections. Some employees — who, again, will lose paychecks if the government shuts down — think the party is simply not up for the moment.
“I’ve been calling my senators for the past two days asking them to not accept the dirty CR and say no on cloture,” said a source at NASA. “This is a way they could visibly stand up against the decimation of our federal agencies… Shutdowns suck, but what we’re experiencing is something much much worse and now is the moment to stand against it or you’re abdicating your duty as an elected official.”
Schumer’s ostensible reason is a practical one, but ignores both [waves hands at everything] and the likelihood that telling a bully he was right to punch you will lead to more punches. “Rolling over on this CR now will convince the Republicans the Democrats will roll on anything,” said the source at the EEOC. “Senator Schumer is not a wartime consigliere.”
All of the federal employees who reached out to Splinter about this are civil servants, who have chosen to make less money than in the private sector to help people and the country at large. “How bad do things have to be for committed civil servants and scientists to be in favor of a shutdown? I’ve never seen anything like this,” said a source at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “In all of the previous shutdowns and threats I’ve never heard anyone say they actually wanted it to happen… We’re scientists; we want to do this work!”
Though again, it is impossible to pin down the entire federal workforce’s opinions, it would make sense that employees facing massive reductions in force in the coming months, after the indignities of the “five bullets” emails and the probationary firings and email signature policing and however many other slights and broadsides, might feel a degree of collective anger at the assailants — and their enablers.
“I’m absolutely furious at Chuck Schumer and the other Dems going along with this CR,” said a source at NIH. “Schumer should be using this fight to bang the drum about Trump/Musk’s destruction of the government and instead he’s giving them they keys to do it.”
The GOP bill, if it passes, will fund the government — such as it is — through September 30. Even former federal employees who have seen their agencies gutted and their jobs eliminated chimed in about the capitulation. “I’ve been seething for weeks that the Democrats were playing dead while DOGE put our agencies through the wood chipper, but telling myself that they must be calculating that they need that leverage for the funding fight,” one source who had his job cut said. “But they are not even going to try. What was the point?”
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