Democrats can wrangle back checks and balances with the 2026 budget

Sen. Schumer and his caucus must seize this chance to reclaim the power of the purse from the administration.

In his war with the Constitution to grab the power of the purse, President Donald Trump won a partial victory last week. Despite three Republican defections in the Senate, Congress approved a “rescissions package” allowing him to cut $9 billion from foreign aid and public broadcasting programs that Congress had previously approved for the 2025 fiscal year. The Senate did muster one small act of defiance, rejecting Trump’s proposal to slash $400 million from PEPFAR—America’s massively life-saving global anti-AIDS program.

But a bigger battle is looming on Sept. 30, when the current fiscal year ends, and Congress must decide how to fund the government in 2026. This time, Democrats will have more leverage, because the Senate’s traditional rules require 60 votes to pass a regular annual budget. Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and his Democratic caucus must seize this chance to restore checks and balances and to show some fight.

Under normal circumstances, the majority party in each house of Congress takes the lead in proposing appropriations bills to fund the government and then negotiates with the minority to get past 60 votes in the Senate. Responsible members on both sides hate government shutdowns and don’t love “continuing resolutions,” which extend the life of previously approved budgets when Congress can’t agree on a new one. So, in practice, bipartisan appropriations agreements are often reached and often pass overwhelmingly.

Democrats would normally have an incentive to agree to one again this year, because that would give them a say in shaping 2026 spending. But these are not normal times, and Democrats have two obvious reasons to demand conditions for their cooperation.

The first is the continued insistence of Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, that Congress’s power of the purse sets a “ceiling” not a “floor.” This would mean that congressional appropriations only set an upper limit on what a president can spend on a given program, and that he could choose to spend less or even nothing if he wants.

Under Vought’s theory, Congress could budget $250 billion for the U.S. Navy (as it did for 2025), and the president could still say “no thanks, I’m going to scuttle all our ships and send our sailors home.” Republicans beware: A future progressive Democratic president could refuse to spend a penny Congress appropriated for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This would be a ridiculous and radical departure from constitutional practice, which even some Republicans have questioned. But don’t count on them to fight it. The burden will be on Democrats to draw the line.

Second, if Republicans offer Democrats some concessions to get to 60 votes—say some additional funds for Medicaid, or for cancer research, or for clean energy programs—Trump could wait for the bills to pass and then submit another rescission request to claw back everything the Democrats obtained. Since only 50 votes are needed to approve rescissions, Trump and the Republicans could achieve this without a single Democratic vote and make the Democrats look like chumps for having agreed to the original appropriations bills.

Schumer and the Democrats should make clear now that they won’t stand for this. They should demand two things in exchange for approving a bipartisan funding bill. Number one: a commitment from Republicans (either from their Senate leaders or from at least four rank-and-file Senators) that they will not support future partisan rescissions that undercut whatever compromises are made to fund the government for 2026. And number two: language in the bill that clearly affirms the president’s obligation to spend no less than what it requires. Without that, I wouldn’t trust Trump and Vought to spend even the $400 million for PEFAR that this Republican Congress thinks it just saved.

If the Republicans don’t agree, will the government shutdown on Sept. 30? Possibly. But Democrats could also offer the option of kicking the can down the road with a temporary “continuing resolution” or “CR.” A CR wouldn’t be ideal. Trump and Vought would likely continue to refuse to spend appropriated funds on anything that doesn’t help their rich friends or deport their poor enemies. The intended recipients of impounded funds would have to keep going to court to get them.

But a CR would not be the worst option for Democrats, because it would extend even further—as negotiations continue—the current government funding levels that were set when Joe Biden was president (which Republicans have every incentive to want to change). Meanwhile, federal courts would probably keep siding with plaintiffs in clear-cut cases of impoundment—just last week, for example, the District of Columbia court ordered the administration to pay Radio Free Europe all of its appropriated funds for the rest of 2025.

The Democrats should fight to win a bipartisan agreement with real guardrails, fall back on a draw for as long as necessary to get that agreement, and, above all, not capitulate by agreeing to a full-year government-funding bill that fails to rein in Trump’s lawless behavior.

We must remember that for Trump this is not really an argument about how much to cut from this or that federal program—like most authoritarian leaders, he is willing to spend like a drunken sailor on things he likes (see ICE, for example). The argument he is trying to win here is about power, not money. He wants to shred the constitutional principle that Congress decides what he can spend—the most practical check the legislative branch in our democracy has on a tyrannical president. And he wants his opponents to look and feel helpless and demoralized.

When Democrats have the leverage to project strength and stand in his way, they have to use it. So let the mantra be: No budget guardrails, no budget deal.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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