How Trump’s megabill has defined the shutdown fight
Plus: Dems notch a decisive win in Arizona, a 2026 candidate calls on Trump to protect soybean farmers and inside CBC Week 2025.
First Things First
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome to Congress Nerd, the flagship newsletter from Once Upon a Hill, where I break down the week’s biggest congressional storylines and chronicle the politics, policy and power players shaping the Democratic Party in the Trump 2.0 era.
If you haven’t already, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to unlock the Sunday edition I publish weekly when Congress is in session. It’s packed with smart scoops, floor previews and what I’m tracking on the Hill to help you create the change you want to see.
In this evening’s edition, I draw the line from the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill this summer to his administration’s threat to fire federal workers en masse unless Democrats agree to a short-term funding bill that excludes a series of their priorities, including those on healthcare.
But let’s start with Adelita Grijalva, who won the special election in Arizona’s 7th congressional district in a decisive victory to succeed her late father, Rep. Raul Grijalva. She defeated Republican Daniel Butierez by a commanding 71%-28% margin (with third-party candidates trailing) in what was long considered a reliably Democratic district.
Grijalva, previously a Pima County supervisor, launched her campaign following the passing of her father in March 2025. She ran on preserving and extending much of his liberal legacy, emphasizing issues such as environmental justice, immigrant rights, healthcare access, worker protections and accountability in federal investigations. Her campaign benefited from name recognition, endorsements from progressive leaders and a favorable electorate in a heavily Hispanic, Democratic-leaning district. Her primary run was also contested—she defeated candidates such as activist Deja Foxx and former state Rep. Daniel Hernández Jr. to secure the Democratic nomination.
Grijalva’s win comes on the heels of Democrat James Walkinshaw’s special election victory in Virginia’s 11th District, where he succeeded the late Rep. Gerry Connolly. With Walkinshaw’s seat now filled and Grijalva’s newly elected, Democrats remain one seat short of having all vacancies closed as they await a November special election in Texas to fill the seat left vacant by Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died a week before Grijalva.
Grijalva’s arrival shifts the House count to 219 Republicans and 214 Democrats, leaving Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) with little room for error, as just two GOP defections would be enough to stall a party-line bill. It also means the House will reach the 218-signature threshold to force a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
Now, on to tonight’s top story.
Republicans head into next week’s government funding deadline projecting confidence rarely seen from their side in Washington budget standoffs.
Speaker Johnson muscled a seven-week continuing resolution through the House last week to keep the lights on through mid-November despite near-unanimous Democratic opposition. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has maintained that Democratic demands on healthcare policy and curbing Donald Trump’s executive authority should be addressed only after a shutdown is averted, not folded into the CR talks. And Trump was so confident heading into the showdown that he told Johnson and Thune not to negotiate at all with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), even though Republicans need Democratic votes to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
This posture can be explained in part by the passage of Trump’s megabill this summer, which already delivered his administration’s top priorities on immigration, energy, defense and tax policy through the fast-track reconciliation process and has freed the White House from the usual dependence on the annual appropriations process to keep its agenda afloat.
It also clarifies the bravado emanating from a memo sent by Trump’s budget office to agencies on Wednesday, directing federal agencies to prepare to execute permanent layoffs in the event of a shutdown, not just the usual furloughs that end when the government is reopened. The Office of Management and Budget memo, first reported by Politico, instructs agencies to focus their reduction-in-force plans on programs that fall outside the Trump administration’s priorities. When paired with the mandatory dollars locked in by the Republican megabill, the memo underscores how little the administration currently fears a lapse in discretionary spending.
But Democrats, under intense pressure from a grassroots base thirsty for their elected leaders to ferociously stand up against Trump during the shutdown showdown, immediately brushed aside the threat as a scare tactic from an administration that moved ahead of mass layoffs and RIFs even after Congress approved a CR in March with the help of Schumer and a handful of leadership-aligned Senate Democrats.
“This is an attempt at intimidation. Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare,” Schumer said in a statement. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government.”
Democratic sources I reached out to after the memo leaked told me that the reduction-in-workforce directive aligns with Project 2025 and the conservative policy blueprint’s goals to slash the federal workforce and weaken agencies seen as hostile to Trump’s priorities. But by linking shutdown preparation to RIF notices, OMB has transformed what would be a short-term restructuring tool into a long-term one that could backfire if voters perceive Trump and Republicans as using the shutdown as a backdoor attempt to shrink the federal workforce permanently. I’m told Democrats are primed to frame the memo as another proof point of Republicans governing by chaos and ideology.
The architect of Trump’s aggressive use of executive budget and personnel authority is OMB Director Russell Vought, who also emerged as a key figure in Project 2025’s roadmap for executive branch control of the government. Vought’s fingerprints are clearly visible in the memo, which critics describe as part of an ideological campaign to reorient government funding away from statutory missions that are misaligned with the White House, towards MAGA loyalists.
“Listen Russ, you are a malignant political hack,” Jeffries said of Vought on X. “We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings. Get lost.”
According to independent estimates, Vought has overseen approximately 300,000 federal layoffs this year, including nearly 100,000 in Virginia alone, where a critical gubernatorial election will take place in November featuring Rep. Abigail Spanberger as the Democratic nominee.
Jeffries made sure to call attention to this dynamic in response to the memo.
“Attention Virginia: Donald Trump and MAGA extremists are plotting mass firings of federal workers starting October 1,” he said from his campaign X account. “Their goal is to ruin your life and punish hardworking families already struggling with Trump Tariffs and inflation. Remember in November.”
The meeting that wasn’t
The calculus for Democrats is simple: A continuing resolution is one of the final remaining must-pass legislative vehicles that they can attempt to undo the harm they say Trump and congressional Republicans have already inflicted in the first nine months of his second term—and protect them from imposing more in the months ahead.
For starters, Democrats want Republicans to roll back the nearly $1 trillion in cuts to federal Medicaid funding passed in Trump’s megabill. They also want the GOP to reverse cuts to scientific medical research that have piled up across multiple fronts this year. The megabill locked in baseline reductions to agencies like the National Institutes of Health by using the reconciliation process to reclassify and shrink key funding streams. The March continuing resolution then extended lower spending levels than Democrats say they had agreed to in a December bipartisan deal, while a Republican-approved rescissions package clawed back unobligated pandemic-era funds for biomedical and public health research. On top of that, the White House has issued guidance freezing balances unless cleared by OMB, leaving research programs squeezed from every direction.
But it’s the expiring Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that have received the most attention, as Democrats contend that a failure to extend them would exacerbate an already worsening healthcare crisis. Millions of people could face higher premiums or lose coverage altogether if the subsidies lapse, according to recent CBO estimates, and Democrats argue that securing an extension now is the only way to give families certainty heading into 2026. Republicans counter that the credits should be debated on their policy merits, not tucked into a stopgap spending bill, and view Democratic insistence on including them in the CR as evidence that the minority is overreaching. The standoff has become a proxy fight over who bears responsibility for the health care system’s stability—and, more immediately, for the consequences of a government shutdown.
Democrats are also pushing to include anti-impoundment language in the CR to prevent the Trump administration from unilaterally clawing back bipartisan appropriations, arguing that such guardrails are essential to prevent Republicans from rewriting spending deals after the fact.
Schumer and Jeffries planned to take these stipulations to an Oval Office meeting with Trump this afternoon, before the president reneged on his invitation earlier this week, and after Johnson and Thune convinced Trump that the Democrats’ demands amounted to partisan add-ons that had no place in a short-term funding measure.
I asked Jeffries this week in Brooklyn if a funding agreement is dependent on a Trump meeting and he told me that the Senate’s failure to pass the House bill proves Democrats must be at the table to avoid a shutdown.
“We have to have a conversation with Donald Trump or Republican leaders in the Congress in order to try to find common ground in ways that can provide a government shutdown if Republicans expect Democratic votes,” Jeffries added. “They tried the my way or the highway approach, and they were shown the highway because the Republican spending bill guts the healthcare of the American people in ways that we as Democrats find completely and totally unacceptable.”
Jeffries declined to comment on Wednesday when I asked if he and Schumer planned to resubmit their meeting request. The two leaders spoke last night to calibrate their strategy.
“We’ve repeatedly made clear that we are going to work together anytime, anyplace and sit down with anyone on the other side of the aisle,” he told me. “Our message is simple: Cancel the cuts, lower the costs, save health care.”
I’m old enough to remember when handshake agreements and side deals provided leaders an off-ramp in high-stakes legislative negotiations. But after Republican leaders reneged on a bipartisan compromise at the behest of then-President-elect Trump, then-Vice President-elect JD Vance, billionaire Elon Musk and later boxed Democrats out of negotiations in March and this month, Jeffries said informal commitments would be insufficient this time around.
“Any agreement related to the healthcare of the American people has to be ironclad and in legislation.”
Dems buoyed by recent polling
Conventional political wisdom suggests that the party that insists on attaching policy riders to a stopgap funding bill usually gets burned, as shutdown politics tend to punish whoever is seen as holding the government hostage.
That’s why some Democrats privately have been wary about making their push to restore healthcare funding the red line in the current fight. But a trio of fresh polls hints that those fears may be overblown.
First, Navigator Research reports that just nine percent of Americans have heard a lot about the looming shutdown. But if one happens, voters say they’d blame Trump and congressional Republicans nearly twice as often as Democrats. Second, Data for Progress found that when persuadable voters were presented with a Democratic message centered on health care, net Democratic vote share surged by 28 points. That’s a sign that taking a stand on ACA tax credits, Medicaid and related programs could be more asset than liability. And third, there’s this wrinkle from the latest Strength in Numbers/Verasight polling: When Democrats’ resistance was framed around restoring healthcare funding, more respondents blamed Republicans (35 percent) than Democrats (24 percent) for a potential shutdown.
Democrats have a simple explanation: Republicans control the House, Senate and White House, so it’s on the GOP to figure out how to secure the votes to pass a bill that Trump can sign into law.
“Republicans have been spending all year saying they have a mandate. And yet Republicans don’t want to do their job and then act like Democrats are unwilling to fund the government,” Jeffries said earlier this week. “Of course, we want to fund the government, but it has to be done in a way that is consistent with the health, the safety and the economic well being of the American people, period full stop.”
Instead of walking into a trap, Democrats may have cover to hold the line as voters appear more sympathetic to Democrats’ rationale of protecting healthcare than to Republicans’ refusal to bargain. For a caucus still scarred from past shutdown fights, the polling provides a different kind of reassurance that fighting back could actually be the safer play.
The soybean situation
In non-shutdown-related news, there are congressional candidates who enter the fray focused on advancing a national agenda and those who promise to prioritize local concerns.
Rebecca Cooke falls into the latter camp.
The former Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation board member and candidate
Cooke, who’s running to unseat MAGA loyalist Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), called on the Trump administration this week to protect soybeans from the volatile impact of the president’s trade war.
U.S. soybean exports to China were hit with tariffs of up to 135 percent this year, with a 40 percent combined tariff rate still in place, and the Trump administration threatening additional tariffs on Chinese goods.
The trade war led to a complete decline in Chinese soybean purchases from the U.S. in the second quarter of 2025, as China has shifted its focus to Brazil. Since 2010, exports to the South American country have increased by 280 percent, while U.S. exports have remained relatively flat.
In Wisconsin, the soybean industry is worth $1.3 billion, according to Cooke’s campaign. But soybean prices have plummeted since 2024; the state risks losing more than $100 million each year in soybean revenue due to tariffs, demand collapse and supply chain issues.
Even a small tariff in a trade dispute has an outsized effect on farmers, since soybeans are heavily export-oriented. (The legume is the U.S. top agricultural export crop.) Equipment, planting schedules and soil preparation are tailored to soybeans so farmers can’t easily pivot to another crop overnight.
Cooke frames the situation as an existential crisis for family farms, rural economies and the way of life she grew up with. And while she says farmers have felt abandoned regardless of which party is in power, she slams Van Orden for supporting the tariffs, describing it as a betrayal of farmers.
If elected, Cooke has promised to work across party lines to bring certainty to farmers, promote competition and prevent consolidation so Wisconsin soybeans can remain the “finest in the world.”
In the meantime, the Trump administration is in damage control.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins indicated to reporters this week that an aid package is being developed to provide relief to American farmers. She said the relief could be fully or partially funded by tariff revenue, which President Trump confirmed in the Oval Office earlier today.
You may recall that the Trump administration issued emergency aid packages during the president’s first term to offset losses from his initial trade war. As I wrote in May for COURIER, these packages were funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a government agency that supports the agriculture sector. But today, the CCC’s ability to provide further assistance is limited, as its funds were nearly depleted at the time. Unlike the 2019 trade war, farmers now have thinner margins and less cushion to withstand the impact.
If the bailout falls short though, Wisconsin’s soybean fields could become ground zero for the broader fight between Trump’s economic nationalism and Democrats’ bid to reclaim rural credibility in 2026.
Want to reach the people shaping policy and politics? Once Upon a Hill puts your message in front of the Capitol’s most plugged-in audience—where influence meets insight. Let’s talk about how a sponsorship can align with your goals. Email michael@onceuponahill.com to learn more.
Trump storm clouds hover over CBC Week
Congress is out of session, but the nation’s capital is still buzzing. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and a who’s who of the Black political class have assembled at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C.
The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference has long been the signature gathering for Black lawmakers, advocates, and community leaders, dating back more than five decades. The weeklong forum has grown from a handful of policy sessions into a sprawling convention of braintrusts, receptions, offsite turn-ups and the high-profile Phoenix Awards gala, making it both a policy hub and a reunion for Black political power.
This year’s theme—“Made For This Moment: Power, Policy and Progress”—underscores the stakes of convening under Trump 2.0. The administration’s aggressive rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, its mass federal layoffs and its rhetoric against “wokeness” have disproportionately hit Black communities. I’ve felt a palpable sense among attendees that the fight for representation and resources remains as urgent as ever.
Nowhere is that urgency more visible than in the experience of Black women. They’ve borne the brunt of the federal workforce cuts and the dismantling of DEI infrastructure, all while carrying a disproportionate load in grassroots organizing and electoral mobilization. Inside the caucus itself, women now outnumber men, and that presence is shaping the conversations at this year’s conference—from health equity to economic empowerment to the hypersexualization of Black women and girls.
“When and where I enter, the entire race enters with me—and I mean, the human race,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) told me after moderating a panel on reproductive justice. “So when Black women are being attacked. Yes, we feel the brunt of everything the most because we always have throughout history. But again, it’s a devastating bellwether of what is to come for everyone else.”
Last but not least
President Trump signed an executive order this afternoon approving a deal to spin off TikTok from its Chinese-based owner almost a year-and-a-half after Congress passed a bill requiring the social app to be sold or banned in the U.S. Trump valued the deal at $14 billion.
In case you missed it, I wrote last week about the frustration among members of Congress with Trump's extension of the pause on enforcing the ban without congressional approval.
And in my weekly COURIER column, I explored how the TikTok deal fits into a growing pattern of private- and public-sector actors aligning with the Trump administration’s retribution campaign to weaken free speech.
If you’re hankering for more tariff journalism, earlier this week I scooped a new report from the Joint Economic Committee explaining how Trump’s trade war is weakening the job market and raising costs as families also face expiring ACA credits, higher utility bills and cuts to social programs.
Alrighty, that’s all I’ve got this week. Keep in touch.