Trump predicts no shutdown as Congress faces spending deadline this week

Niels Lesniewski, CQ-Roll Call on Mar 10, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump alleged Sunday that “the Democrats want” a government shutdown at the end of this week, but he predicted that a lapse in appropriations probably will not take place this time.

“I think the CR is going to get passed. We’ll see. But it could happen,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, referring to a continuing resolution that would extend current funding until the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The current funding extension expires at the end of Friday.

The wrangling over that continuing resolution to prevent a partial shutdown will dominate the agenda for both the House and the Senate this week. The House Republican majority posted text of a stopgap appropriations measure Saturday that is not a bipartisan agreement. Democrats sought provisions to ensure that appropriated funds will actually be spent — and not subject to the potential whims of the Elon Musk-led office known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

“Democrats have a choice to join us or display their true intentions. Should they choose to vote to shut the government for negotiation leverage and their contempt of President Trump, they are readying to hurt hundreds of millions more,” House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said in a weekend statement. “It’s a battle they lost in November, and one the people will continue to see through.”

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, is arguing for a shorter stopgap that would preserve the possibility of an omnibus.

“Congress — not Trump or Musk — should decide through careful bipartisan negotiations how to invest in our states and districts — and whether critical programs that support students, veterans, families, and patients get funded or not,” Murray said in a statement.

While waiting for the CR, the Senate will start the week by confirming Lori Chavez-DeRemer to be Labor secretary. In the debate-limiting cloture vote on March 6, Chavez-DeRemer won the support of 66 senators, with only Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul voting in opposition from the GOP side of the aisle. There had been concerns about her record being more favorable to organized labor than many other Republicans.

Sen. John Hawley, R-Mo., was among those making the case in her favor.

“As her confirmation hangs in the balance, Republicans should resist the temptation to relapse into the destructive division between business and labor that sabotaged American workers for too long. If we care about the working class as we claim to, we must confirm the President’s pick,” Hawley wrote in an opinion piece for the Daily Caller.

Other nominations already in the queue for floor votes this week are Trump’s picks of Steven Bradbury to be deputy secretary of Transportation and Abigail Slater to be an assistant attorney general.

The Senate is also on track to proceed to a bill designed to counter fentanyl. The cloture vote on taking up that measure, sponsored by Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Bill Cassidy, R-La., sailed through the Senate, 82-16, and there’s a chance the actual debate opens by voice vote Monday night.

“It’s time that all fentanyl analogues are permanently classified as what they are: the most deadly kind of drugs,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a floor speech on Thursday.

Senate committees will also keep working to prepare Trump’s nominees for floor consideration. Cassidy’s panel is scheduled to vote Thursday on a pair of key health nominees: Jay Bhattacharya to be director of the National Institutes of Health and Martin Makary to take the helm of the Food and Drug Administration.

The Foreign Relations Committee will see a familiar face on Capitol Hill Thursday, when former House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., is scheduled to testify at a confirmation hearing for his nomination to be ambassador to Canada — which could be quite a job, with ongoing tariff agitations from Trump and the president talking about wanting Canada to become a U.S. state.

Along with Hoekstra, two other ambassador nominees are scheduled to appear Thursday: George Glass, nominated to be ambassador to Japan; and Ronald Johnson (the former ambassador to El Salvador, not the senator from Wisconsin), nominated to be ambassador to Mexico.

The House, meanwhile, is expected to take up a resolution under the Congressional Review Act that would stop an IRS rule on digital asset reporting. The Senate passed its version of that measure by a vote of 70-27 last week. If the House were to take up and pass the Senate companion, it would be cleared for the president’s signature.

“This rule, issued as a midnight regulation in the final days of the previous Administration, would stifle American innovation and raise privacy concerns over the sharing of taxpayers’ personal information, while imposing an unprecedented compliance burden on American DeFi Companies,” the White House said in a Statement of Administration Policy, recommending that Trump sign the Senate’s joint resolution if presented to him.

Also on the House agenda this week is a bill related to pandemic unemployment fraud.