Growing calls among hardline House conservatives to incorporate cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) into a developing government funding bill are complicating efforts to avert a shutdown two weeks ahead of the looming deadline.
The pleas are poised to pin Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) into the tricky — yet familiar — position of managing his right flank while keeping the lights on in Washington, which will require some support from congressional Democrats.
“I would have a real hard time voting for a clean [continuing resolution] after everything that we’ve seen out of DOGE,” said Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus.
Asked if he wanted to see Congress implement the DOGE cuts in the government funding bill, Crane responded: “One hundred thousand percent.”
Reflecting DOGE cuts in appropriations, however, would spark outcry from Democrats and almost certainly lead to a government shutdown — an outcome that Johnson wants to avoid in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, when the Republican trifecta is trying to tick items off their to-do list.
“I don’t know what they’re even talking about,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said when asked about including the DOGE cuts in the funding bill. “I mean, every day it’s something.”
Those dynamics are set to come to a head in the coming weeks, when congressional leaders will have to craft a government funding plan and get it to Trump’s desk by the March 14 deadline. Leaders increasingly say that will require some kind of continuing resolution (CR), its length yet to be determined, as discussions about fiscal year 2025 levels continue — a measure that will require at least some Democratic support due to the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
But hardliners are sounding adamant on their asks.
“Why are we even having DOGE if we’re not gonna solidify and put it in the CR?” asked Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a fiscal hawk who said he “absolutely” wants the department’s cuts included in the government funding bill.
The details of a stopgap are still in the works. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Democrats are demanding language that ensures Trump cannot undercut the eventual deal.
Johnson, for his part, appears to be evolving on the question of codifying DOGE efforts in the funding bill.
Asked Wednesday afternoon about including the slashes in the stopgap, the Speaker cast doubt on the idea, expressing support for a bill with minimal policy add-ons — potential details that would complicate the path to getting sufficient Democratic support.
“I don’t know if we can get it into the CR,” Johnson told reporters when asked about reflecting DOGE cuts in the legislation. “If it’s a CR it probably is as close to a clean CR as possible because that’s the most reasonable thing to do to ensure that the government is not shut down.”
Later that day, however, Johnson floated the idea of reflecting some of the DOGE actions in the funding bill language.
“That’s why I say you add anomalies to a CR, you can increase the spending, you can decrease the spending, you can add language that says, for example, the dramatic changes that have been made to USAID would be reflected in the ongoing spending,” Johnson said during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “It would be a clean CR mostly, I think, but with some of those changes to adapt to the new realities here, and the new reality is less government, more efficiency, a better return for the taxpayers.”
He would not dive into specifics regarding what that language would look like on Thursday morning.
“It would not make sense to appropriate funds to divisions of an agency that doesn’t exist all the more, right. So you just have to apply reason to this,” Johnson told reporters. “But I’m not gonna forecast what the components of the CR would be, it’s being negotiated like anything.”
Some of the efforts being eyed by hardline Republicans are focused on the U.S. Agency for International Development workers (USAID), which DOGE — the brainchild of billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk — has sought to dismantle since the beginning days of the Trump administration. The majority of USAID staffers were recently informed that they would be put on leave, while others were fired.
“Right now I think most of my colleagues would say, why are we going to fund the very things that DOGE is identifying that we shouldn’t be funding?” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas.) said. “So I think we’ve got to have an interplay with what they’re doing.”
Roy pointed to an announcement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the administration was canceling $60 billion in U.S. assistance from across the globe.
“You had Marco last night, I should say Secretary of State Rubio, last night, put out that they’re canceling a bunch of USAID contracts, I think it was something like $60 billion, I think it was what was reported. So we’re trying to take all that in,” he said. “But we shouldn’t be funding the things that they’re canceling or undoing.”
Upping the pressure, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) suggested that not codifying the DOGE cuts would amount to a break from the administration’s efforts.
“I think it would be difficult for the American people to support a CR that funds some of these agencies that DOGE has come out and shown tremendous waste, fraud and abuse in. I mean, that would kind of go against what the President is currently doing,” Clyde said.
Across the Capitol, however, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) threw cold water on the idea of codifying DOGE cuts in the spending bill, kicking the effort into the next fiscal year — underscoring the difficult path Johnson will face is he tries to fit DOGE cuts into the spending bill.
“I don’t see how that could work,” Collins told reporters. “We should consider [it] in the FY 26 appropriations process, where we can hear testimony from all of the secretaries and other agency heads.”
