A Clean CR
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Opinion from The Washington Times
Uncle Sam goes broke next Friday, unless Congress acts. We’ve seen this Kabuki play out many times, and the ending never changes. To get enough votes to pass a continuing resolution (CR), lawmakers load the must-pass bill with sufficient pork to sate wastrels on both sides of the aisle, and the government expands.
Donald Trump has created a plot twist for this familiar tale. He’s insisting on a clean CR through September—without the pork—while continuing to put the entire federal bureaucracy on a diet. House Speaker Mike Johnson likes the idea and could have a CR on the floor as early as Tuesday.
“We will fund the government responsibly, and at OMB — the Office of Management and Budget, the White House — they will not direct funds to these categories of things that have been shown to be abusive. What will happen on the back end… we’ll be able to go back later and do recissions,” the Louisiana Republican said.
Unwilling to allow the government to slim down, Democrats say they won’t contribute a single vote to the effort. They prefer to see a shutdown that would tarnish Mr. Trump, not realizing the 47th president could win this battle, with or without the CR.
Should the temporary funding extension fail, non-essential federal employees will be sent home. Essential employees will have to keep doing their jobs, but their paychecks will be delayed until the situation is resolved. Progressives assume this would help them politically because that happened during past shutdowns when Democrats occupied the Oval Office.
President Barack Obama, for example, ordered national parks and museums to make a big show of their closure, denying the public access to monuments that aren’t even manned by full-time National Park Service staff. The spiteful National Zoo even unplugged the Panda Cam, and GOP lawmakers felt the sting of plummeting poll numbers for it.
But it’s 2025, and federal agencies are no longer run by intentional obstructionists. The new management decides who qualifies as an essential employee. If handled properly, nothing important will close this time.
Under an executive order Mr. Trump signed last month, agencies are already supposed to eliminate “all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations.”
Left-leaning federal judges have been issuing temporary restraining orders to thwart the trimming of the federal workforce because they, too, are averse to smaller government. Recently, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled OPM’s effort to direct the firing of unnecessary employees at 6 different agencies was “unlawful, invalid, and must be stopped and rescinded.”
This appointee of President Bill Clinton doesn’t care that the latest Harris Poll shows 76% of the public backs Mr. Trump’s effort to slash wasteful spending. His honor intends to use his gavel to keep these non-essential employees from losing their lifetime gigs.
Unfortunately for him, a funding lapse would mean those non-essential employees couldn’t be put back on the job. In this way, a shutdown would bypass meddling jurists while giving the Supreme Court more time to weigh in on the extent of the president’s executive power under Article II of the Constitution.
A shutdown is still risky since agenda-driven corporate media outlets will do their best to portray events as chaotic. It just isn’t the automatic win Democrats assume it will be. Enacting a clean funding bill is the most sensible strategy for both sides.
