ICYMI: A Face-off Ahead Of Another Possible Government Shutdown

0:07You're listening to the 1A Podcast. I'm Jen White, and this is In Case You Missed It, where we bring you some of the week's most important conversations you might have missed. Congress returned to the Capitol on Tuesday after their month-long summer break, and they are already on a time crunch. Lawmakers have around four weeks, or around just 14 legislative days, to pass a spending measure and avoid a government shutdown before September 30th. Tensions between Republicans and Democrats are high after the passage of President Trump's big tax and spending bill and the rescission bill, which clawed back$9 billion in already allocated funds.

0:45Democrats say they're ready for a fight. But potentially being blamed for a government shutdown also puts them in a tough spot. On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson said the ball is in the Democrats' court, but will Republicans play ball at all with the Democrats? Arthur Delaney joins us after the break to discuss the latest. He's a senior reporter at HuffPost. And a reminder, this story is rapidly changing. For all the latest, be sure to tune into your local member station and visit npr.org. Stay with us. Back with more in a moment.

1:19Arthur, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Before we get to the budget, let's talk about some other news. At a press conference today held by Republican Congressman Thomas Massey, victims of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse, along with other survivors of sexual abuse, are speaking out. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are asking for a full release of the Epstein files. On Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said they released tens of thousands of records in connection to Epstein. What's the latest about what's been released and what people still want to see? So the release by the House Oversight Committee was done essentially in cooperation with the Trump administration, using material that had been provided to them by the Justice Department in response to a bipartisan subpoena.

2:04So that was a remarkable turn of events that resulted from the uproar over the DOJ initially saying they wouldn't put out anything. But Massey and Ro Khanna, the Republican and Democrat leading a push for a full release, say that this material from the Oversight Committee is really just an effort to stymie full transparency. For one thing, the material is not easy to look at. It's in a Google Drive, and it's really unwieldy if you're not familiar with downloading files of that sort. And it's not searchable like they call for in their legislation. So this press conference is ongoing as we speak, And it's by far the largest crowd I've ever seen at a press conference at that location outside the Capitol.

2:54And I think it shows that this Epstein battle is going to continue, even though Republican leadership and the administration are behind this sort of tandem, separate effort to release the files their way. Well, let's move to the budget and the mechanics of what Democrats and Republicans need to do to avoid a government shutdown. So there are narrow margins in Congress. How much bipartisan support is needed to get a spending measure across the finish line? You don't need any bipartisan support in the House, but you do in the Senate. And that's why this is a real tricky situation, because Republicans control 53 Senate seats.

3:36but you'll probably need 60 votes to get a law through there. So it's anyone's guess what's going to happen, but a shutdown at the end of the month is entirely possible. We heard from all the different leaders yesterday, and they say they don't want a shutdown, but they're clearly in the early stages of a negotiation slash standoff, and it's not clear what their demands will even be yet. Now, we know Democrats are pushing for health care funding that was cut in Trump's big tax and spending bill. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X, quote, if Republicans want Democrats to provide votes to fund the Trump administration, they can start by restoring the health care that they ripped away to finance more tax handouts for billionaires.

4:25And that comes as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries push for Republicans to address what they call a, quote, looming health care crisis due to the cut. So what else might Democrats ask for? It's not clear because they're not saying any of this explicitly like Elizabeth Warren did. I think the Democratic leaders will have a unified position, and it's likely that Warren will not be on the inside of that. But I don't know, because Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer did say a lot about health care in the statements they made yesterday, while not explicitly saying we need you to avert the lapse of Obamacare subsidies at the end of the year, or we need you to undo the Medicaid cuts that were part of your big, beautiful bill.

5:15So there's clearly health care is a top Democratic talking point right now. Now, it's not clear if it will become an actual demand, but it's definitely a thing to watch. Take us inside what Republicans and Democrats are hearing from their constituents as they try to negotiate some sort of spending bill before September 30th. There's been a lot of criticism of Democrats from their constituents saying, you're not applying enough pressure on Republicans. You're not fighting back the way we want you to fight back. Republicans also spent some time in their home districts over the break. What did they hear?

5:53Well, most Republicans are not doing town halls because they just haven't been good for them this year. The big bill is unpopular. And the few that have had town halls have been getting screamed at about the Medicaid cuts, the tax cuts for the rich. And so there was only a little bit of that over the August break. The Democrats do have groups that want them to be more combative, to fight. There was a near shutdown in March where a lot of liberal voters were disappointed at the way Democrats acted like they wanted to potentially resist, you know, fight the Trump administration by not agreeing to government funding.

6:36But then they ultimately caved. And that was a decision by Chuck Schumer. And so groups like Indivisible are now saying, well, you better not do that again. But it's really not clear to me what plan Democrats have got right now. I mean, they just had their first meeting on the House side this morning. And we're basically waiting to find out more. But I think this will be done at a high level among the leaders. We got this email from Sarah who says, Shouldn't we be able to balance the budget with all our doge savings, rescissions, and the trillions of dollars Trump claims to be bringing in from tariffs?

7:11Tongue firmly in cheek. Have we heard anything from the Trump administration on his cost-saving measures in terms of the budget? Well, the Trump administration did a unilateral rescission or pocket rescission where they said, oh, hey, we're cutting$5 billion out of foreign aid. And that is not helping congressional lawmakers get a deal. Because in the Senate, there had been some bipartisan work on appropriations bills. That's usually the real substantive version of funding the government. And if the Trump administration is just going to haul off and cancel spending that they are appropriating, that doesn't help.

7:50And Republican senators have said what the Trump administration did was illegal. They might take legal action. So that's happening in the background of these intra-party negotiations. So it's, I would say at this point, a bit chaotic, still a bit early. We have several weeks, but there's also the question of whether you can't get a more complicated deal. So you just continue government spending at current levels. And I think Trump administration might be happy with that. You know, that's sort of punting, but they got all this extra money that they wanted in the big bill that had funding for border enforcement and the Defense Department.

8:28Republicans and Democrats have different feelings about that kind of funding. There's also the option of doing really short continuing resolutions, but that continues the crisis basically, and we have a series of looming deadlines. So this is the array of stuff that is on the menu right now, and it's totally unclear at this point what they're going to order up. I have to wonder, Arthur, as someone who's covered Congress for a long time, are you having deja vu? Oh, yes. This is definitely a ritual here. You know, they're supposed to pass a budget like early in the year that they receive from the president and then they mark up.

9:10And they never, ever do that, even though it's like the law that they're supposed to. It's always this kind of ad hoc stuff. And it seems to get crazier all the time. and certainly with the Trump administration, not only doing pocket rescissions, but all kinds of stuff that's like clearly or perhaps arguably illegal, the situation is more unpredictable than it ever has been. And it's also uncommon that we've got Democratic activists so vocal about how Democrats ought to handle this. It's usually been the Republican side where there's like an outright desire for a government shutdown. So I'm curious to hear from you what the stakes are in this negotiation, because if there is a shutdown, there's who gets the blame.

9:58There's the impact on the economy. But again, as you mentioned, there's a push from some Democratic activists to say, hey, you've got to hold the line. I mean, what's on the table right now, Arthur? Because it sounds like the table is pretty full. It's all on the table. Keep in mind a government shutdown. We're talking about a partial government shutdown, like important stuff like Social Security checks keep going out. The military doesn't cease doing all the stuff it's doing. But there is disruption to many things. For example, national parks. What are the stakes? What were the stakes in March?

10:33There were liberal activists wanting the shutdown, saying that if you don't do it, the Trump administration will go ahead and continue doing all the bad stuff it wants to do, which I guess you could say is what has happened. However, what's the counterfactual? If you go into a shutdown situation where the Trump administration already has a mavericky budget director doing things like pocket rescissions, does that actually give him more power to run the government the way he wants? So we don't know, but there's definitely stakes. That's Arthur Delaney. He's a senior reporter at HuffPost. He joined us from the Capitol.

11:11Arthur, it's always great to talk to you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening, and let's talk more soon. This is 1A.

11:43Thank you.