Two Congressional representatives from the East Bay are expressing outrage after 10 Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, voted in favor of a Republican budget bill to keep the government open for the next six months and enact drastic spending cuts across federal agencies.
The bill passed 54-46 on Friday as a government shutdown loomed and President Trump signed the bill into law on Monday.
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The outcome presents a stark division between Bay Area progressives and the Democratic Party’s Senate leadership in how they seek to oppose President Donald Trump and Republicans, whose slim majorities in Congress present both opportunity and risk for Democrats’ efforts to combat conservatives’ agenda.
Bay Area progressives say Schumer and others are unnecessarily giving up the Democratic party’s remaining leverage in Congress.
“In addition to making harmful cuts, the Republican funding bill is a blank check for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to continue cutting critical programs the American people rely on, like Social Security and Medicaid, so they can give even more tax breaks to billionaires,” U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier told the Bay Area News Group. His 10th Congressional District includes parts of Contra Costa and Alameda counties, including the cities of Antioch, Concord, Danville, Dublin, San Ramon and Walnut Creek.
The bill includes $893 billion for defense and $708 billion for nondefense expenditures, in addition to $54 billion in cuts across the government through 2034, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit public policy group. While the bill would keep the government open and operational through Sept. 30, many Democrats questioned the fiscal responsibility of cuts to revenue-generating agencies.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote on March 11 that the bill’s cuts in funding to Internal Revenue Service resources in 2024 “will result in revenue losses” from increased noncompliance with the country’s tax code. Cuts to other programs would not make up the revenue lost from the IRS, and the CRFB estimates a $7 billion increase to the federal deficit through 2034.
The House passed the bill by a 217-213 vote on March 11, almost entirely along party lines.
“If Republicans needed our votes, then we should have held them to our previous bipartisan agreement and leveraged our position to get a bill that works for everyone, rather than bailing out Republicans again and handing out more power to the president and (Elon) Musk,” DeSaulnier said. “I was proud to vote against the bill in the house, and If I were a senator, I would have voted ‘no’ again.”
Rep. Lateefah Simon, who represents Alameda County and the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Alameda, Albany and most of San Leandro in the 12th Congressional District, said she was proud of her allies’ resolute opposition to the bill, but she was shocked by what happened when the bill went to the Senate.
“I’m disappointed in the Senate’s actions,” Simon told Bay Area News Group.
Simon said House Democrats are united behind House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in opposing the continuing resolution.
By voting in favor of the legislation, Senate Democrats helped avoid a government shutdown. DeSaulnier had experienced a 35-day government shutdown between 2018 and 2019 under the last Trump administration, stemming from an impasse for $5.7 billion in funds to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. Democrats in the minority had used the filibuster to block the funding for the measure. In January 2019, Democrats won the 2018 midterms that gave them the majority in the House, and they were able to pass an appropriations bill without border wall funding.
Democrats’ Senate leadership’s support of the funding bill last week frustrated DeSaulnier, who said the party had given up its leverage too easily when the filibuster was one of its last remaining levers of power in the current Congress. DeSaulnier told the Bay Area News Group that the present moment should have been an opportunity for Democrats to fight for their constituents and present a unified front against the president and Republicans’ agenda.
“With so much on the line, including American’s lives and livelihoods and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, this was the time to fight, not relent to Republicans holding the government hostage,” DeSaulnier said.
