By: Orion Donovan Smith
WASHINGTON – Less than a month into their new administration, President Donald Trump and his billionaire deputy Elon Musk have unleashed a dizzying set of policy changes by fiat, flexing the power of the executive branch and in some cases steamrolling the legislative branch with virtually no public pushback from Republicans in Congress.
Congressional Democrats, reeling from a narrow yet decisive loss in November’s election, have been regrouping while getting inundated with phone calls and emails from constituents who want them to stand up to the Trump administration and the GOP lawmakers who control both the House and Senate. While they hold none of the traditional levers of power in the nation’s capital, Democrats stand to gain some leverage in the coming months, when Republicans will likely need their help to fund the government and raise its borrowing limit.
In interviews at the Capitol on Wednesday and Thursday, eight Washington Democrats said they plan to highlight the impact of the dozens of executive orders Trump has signed while relying on the courts to stop or at least slow some of those actions. Most said they would help Republicans avert a government shutdown and the economic catastrophe that could follow a default on the nation’s debts – but only if they get something in return.
Sen. Patty Murray
The dean of Washington’s congressional delegation and the longest-serving Democrat in the upper chamber, Murray leads her party on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, where she works with Republican Chairwoman Susan Collins of Maine to write the annual legislation that funds the government.
Along with Collins and their counterparts in the House, Murray is currently negotiating a bill that would extend government funding currently set to run out on March 14. Asked what Democrats can do to counter Trump’s actions, she turned the question around.
“The real question here is: What are Republicans going to do to get Democratic votes?” she said. “The House is not going to pass anything on their own. Here in the Senate, on appropriations bills, no matter how they want to frame it at this point, they’re going to need Democratic votes.”
Republicans in Congress also will need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling to pass the tax cuts and other priorities Trump promised during the campaign, which are projected to add trillions to the national debt that currently stands at more than $36 trillion. Passing that bill, which faces a fuzzier deadline sometime in the coming months, also would require Democratic votes in the Senate – and likely in the House, where GOP fiscal hawks have consistently opposed debt ceiling hikes.
Those two bills will give Murray and other Democratic leaders significant leverage to extract concessions from Republicans. The senator declined to reveal the demands she will make in exchange for her vote, but she said her message to Republicans is, “Hey, you created this chaos. What are you going to do to fix it?”
If Republicans can’t pass a new appropriations bill, they may try to extend government funding at the current levels through the end of the fiscal year with a so-called continuing resolution, or CR, but Murray said that approach is a nonstarter. That’s partly because it wouldn’t reflect the current year’s needs, but it could also effectively give the administration a fungible pot of money to do whatever it wants.
“All we’re doing is just horrible management in the best of situations,” she said. “But in the worst of situations, we just hand money to Elon to do what he wants to because it’s not designated. So that’s just a no-go for me.”
In the short term, Murray said, the best place to slow the administration’s moves is in the courts, “The best way we can do that is to hear from people who are impacted,” she said.
But, she added, her team has lost many of its contacts in federal agencies, either because they’ve been fired or because they’re “living in fear” and reluctant to speak out.
“One of the things we need to do is really highlight the stories,” she said. “Why is that important? Because the more people see the reality of what’s coming from all of this, the more they will put pressure on the Republicans to change it.”
Murray said some Republican senators privately tell her they oppose what Trump and Musk are doing but the administration has used threats and offers of federal projects in their states to keep GOP senators in line and secure their near-unanimous support for controversial nominees and policies.
“I’m hearing from a lot of them who are deeply concerned about what’s happening,” she said. “At some point, and it won’t be long, they’re going to say, ‘OK, you gave me this project, but you don’t have any other projects to give me, and I’ve got to work for my constituents here.’”
Asked if Trump and his allies would just use proverbial sticks when they run out of carrots to offer wavering senators, Murray shuddered at what she called a “scary” prospect.
“God, at some point, you have to in your own brain go, ‘Why am I here?’” she said. “Because Trump is president right now, but he won’t be forever. So if you’re looking at yourself and going, ‘I want to run for election in six years or four years,’ you’re going to run on what you did, not on that guy.”
Rep. Kim Schrier
A moderate who flipped a previously Republican-held seat in 2018, Schrier represents the state’s only district that spans the Cascades, stretching from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs. She said Republicans have also told her privately about the pressure they feel from Trump and his allies, including “death threats from the president’s most loyal followers.”
“Some of them have a fear of the president, but many of them have a fear of the president’s base and the Proud Boys,” she said. “Totally reasonable Republicans come to me and say that when they have a town hall, people will come up and they’ll just sort of move their hand and show them that they have a gun and ask them a question. That’s got to be intimating, when there are threats to you and your family, and so I think they are probably deciding when it’s worth taking that risk.”
Schrier said Democrats need to take a “three-pronged approach” of supporting legal actions against Trump’s policies, calling public attention to their impact and finally demanding compromises from Republicans in exchange for Democratic votes to keep the government open. A physician with an interest in health care policy, Schrier deferred to her party’s leaders to decide what their demands would be, but she said that “messing with Medicaid is a nonstarter.”
“I mean, if Republicans would stand up and do their job, they’re in the majority,” she said. “They have the power to stand up and say, ‘Wait a minute. This is our purview. We did these appropriations. We decide where the money goes. Get your hands out of it.’ But they won’t stand up to him, even though I know from one-on-one conversations they are very worried about what’s going on.”
Schrier said Republicans “have made their own bed” by standing with Trump through the so-called “Access Hollywood tape” in which he bragged about groping women and through two impeachments, the second of which – for inciting the Capitol riot – sent lawmakers from both parties fleeing in fear for their lives.
“Now they have fear of an emboldened president, but they made this happen,” she said. “Every time they choose to stand with him instead of standing with the United States of America, they embolden him and they dig themselves deeper into this predicament that they’re in.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal
Jayapal, who represents most of Seattle and led the Congressional Progressive Caucus until the end of 2024, said her office has been inundated with calls and emails from constituents. She said her first response to them is, “I agree with you. I am outraged, too.”
“I think we have to be using our platform to shine a light on what is actually happening,” she said. “The power of this is going to be in the judiciary and in the public, and we have to make sure that people understand we’re fighting every step of the way, and that our legislative power is limited. We can’t move bills, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be active and we can’t shine a light.”
Jayapal said she has encouraged her constituents to talk to their friends and relatives who live in states and districts represented by Republicans. She said she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling or avert a government shutdown if it means enabling GOP priorities.
“The voters put them in power, so they’re going to have to show that they can govern, because the things that they’re doing are so bad for the American people that we can’t be complicit in those things,” she said. “We don’t have the power to shut down the government. We’re in the minority party, so whatever happens, it’s on them.”
Rep. Adam Smith
Washington’s longest-serving House member, Smith represents part of Seattle and the city’s suburbs to the south and east. After being one of the first Democrats in Congress to call for then-President Joe Biden to drop out of his race against Trump in 2024, the plainspoken congressman has sought to improve what he sees as his party’s ineffective messaging.
“We need to stop talking about what we can’t do,” he said. “We don’t control the president, don’t control the House and don’t control the Senate, and it’s worth making sure people are aware of that, but it shouldn’t be the central focus of our explanation.”
What Democrats can do, Smith said, is communicate clearly to Americans across the country – and to spend less time fighting with each other.
“The problem right now is Republicans think the country is with them, so they feel no pressure,” he said. “How do we message in a way that expands the base of people who support us? Just saying, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re cutting government. Isn’t that terrible?’ isn’t going to work. Talking about how they cut off programs and are starving children to death, I think that’s effective.”
As the co-chair of the bipartisan Caucus for Effective Foreign Assistance, Smith said he has been trying to get Republicans in the group to sign a letter opposing the Trump administration’s sudden halt in assistance to famine-stricken countries like Sudan, which has left nearly $500 million in food aid at risk of spoiling, according to a report by USAID’s inspector general, who Trump fired immediately after the report was published.
“We have to be intelligent about this and stop yelling at each other,” he said on Wednesday. “Today, we’re getting a whole bunch of phone calls from people saying, ‘The way to stop Trump is to shut down Congress. You guys should be obstructionist.’ Congress isn’t the ones doing this right now! You shut down Congress. Trump is going to go, ‘Thank you very much.’ He doesn’t want Congress. He’s ignoring Congress.”
Instead, Smith said, Democrats should spend less time attacking each other and more time thinking about the most effective way for their messages to reach outside of left-wing bubbles.
“Be excited, be enthusiastic, be engaged, but also be smart about it,” he said. “You could have spent those words talking about how Trump is attempting a fascist takeover of America, or how he cut off aid programs and abandoned aid workers all over the world and we’re now going to witness the spread of AIDS because we stopped funding one of the most successful programs ever. Let’s spend a little bit of breath talking about the bad stuff the Republicans are doing, instead of micromanaging everything that every Democrat says out there.”
Smith also warned against left-wing advocacy groups pushing Democrats to defend what he called untenable positions – like defunding police departments or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement – that hurt the party’s chances of winning outside of a relatively few progressive pockets across the country.
“You’re creating a situation where you may be able to win what you’re talking about in Seattle, in my district, but you’re not going to win nationwide,” he said. “You’re going to wind up with a Republican president, a Republican Senate and a Republican House, and then you are going to be significantly impaired in the number of tools you have available to you.”
Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he wouldn’t vote for a government funding bill if it advances Trump’s plans to cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations and increases the Pentagon budget while cutting funding for foreign aid and programs Americans rely on. But he reiterated the importance of how Democrats explain that opposition.
“The way we should put it is not, ‘Oh, I’m not going to help them,’ ” he said. “It should be, ‘Here are our priorities. We’re going to insist upon these priorities because they are important for this country, for the American people.’ And if they don’t give us our priorities, then no, I’m not going to vote for it.”
Rep. Emily Randall
The newest Democratic member of Washington’s congressional delegation, Randall was elected for the first time in 2024 to represent part of Tacoma and the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas. After serving in the Democratic-controlled Washington state Senate, she said she spends a lot of time thinking about how to be effective in the House minority.
“I think some of our tools are certainly, like, ‘Where can we work together?’ ” she said. “Are there any points at all, with any members, where we can find opportunities to make people’s lives better? That’s our job to do.”
Although she has joined the Progressive Caucus, whose members typically don’t vote with Republicans, Randall didn’t rule out voting to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling if doing so could temper the Trump administration’s policies.
“We’ve had like 1,200 calls in the last week or so, people concerned about the funding freeze, about emails telling them that they no longer are needed to do their federal work, folks who feel scared about what is happening to their jobs, to their future, to their families,” she said. “And I think it’s our job to listen to those stories.”
Randall said she has been personally answering phone calls to her office – something most lawmakers leave to their aides and interns. A veteran who served multiple tours overseas before becoming a civilian employee of the government wondered what the infamous “Fork in the Road” email, which encouraged federal workers to quit and be paid through September, said about their years of service to the country.
“I’ve been stopped on the sidewalk at home and in the grocery store,” Randall said. “I go home every weekend, and folks are like, ‘I cannot believe this is happening.’ “
The freshman congresswoman said constituents have been sending her messages saying how scared they are and telling her to “shut down the government.” She has replied that, although shutting down the government isn’t something she can do alone, she also remembers the people who missed paychecks during past government shutdowns during Trump’s first administration.
“People are afraid of losing our federal employees,” said Randall, who represents a disproportionate number of federal workers and Naval Base Kitsap. “It’s a great cost to military readiness. We have child care workers and health care workers and tribal leaders who are worried about what happens if our government shuts down or if we stop funding congressionally authorized grant programs. So those stories are at the table. And I look forward to many more caucus discussions about what our path forward is.”
Rep. Marilyn Strickland
The former mayor of Tacoma, Strickland has represented most of that city and its environs since 2021. She said Americans shouldn’t be surprised by what Trump is doing, since he promised much of it during the campaign, but they should be surprised by the unprecedented power the president has handed over to Musk, the world’s richest man whose companies have multiple contracts with the federal government.
“Elon Musk is basically in charge of making government more efficient, which everyone supports, but he’s basically destroying our institutions, wreaking havoc and harming people,” she said. “Trump ran on the promise of addressing the cost of living, trying to make things easier for the United States, making us more safe, and nothing they have done so far indicates that they even care about that.”
Strickland pointed to Trump’s and Musk’s plan of eliminating the Department of Education, which would officially require an act of Congress, as a move with tangible effects on Americans that Democrats need to highlight.
“The Department of Education does a lot of important work in funding for students who have disabilities, funding for school districts that are underserved and may not have the same tax base and resources as others,” she said. “But I will tell you this, when I think about what is happening with the Department of Education, I look at this as a march to really compromise our public school system.” Based on her experience in the last Congress, when Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate while Republicans held the House, Strickland said she doesn’t trust Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to keep his word in negotiations.
“They have the House, they have the Senate and they have the White House,” she said. “It is their responsibility, not the Democrats’, to show that they can govern. It is their responsibility, not the Democrats’, to keep government open. It is their responsibility, not the Democrats’, to do the right thing.”
Strickland also voiced frustration that no Republican in Congress has criticized Trump for freezing federal spending that Congress has appropriated in bipartisan bills that many GOP lawmakers voted for. Only if those Republicans hear from enough of their own voters, she predicted, would they speak up.
“Clearly, Trump has influence. They are afraid of him and they will do whatever he wants,” she said. “They need to hear from the people they represent. I can tell you firsthand that there are people who voted for Trump who are having buyer’s remorse right now because the actions being taken by Musk and Trump are actually hurting their livelihoods.”
Rep. Rick Larsen
The top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Larsen represents Everett and the northwestern part of the state.
“The Republicans are bragging that they have the White House, the Senate and the House, which comes with responsibility to do their work,” he said. “If they want to shut the government down, it’ll be on them, not on Democrats. If they want to fund services that help people, I think Democrats will be open to that. So we do have some leverage, because the pressure is on them to perform.”
Larsen said his panel’s role in regulating air safety and other critical issues give the parties an incentive to work together, even while he intends to put a spotlight on what he sees as bad policies from the Trump administration.
“We also have leverage points for oversight,” he said. “There are places we in the House can work together in order to press the agencies, but there are areas where – if the administration wants to tear down agencies for their own sake and put people at risk, or strip health care from people, or strip food from the mouths of kids – we are going to fight back.”
Democratic leadership will ultimately be responsible for making the party’s demands, Larsen said, but they should be guided by some basic principles that are easy to understand.
“Certainly, we want people to have access to health care,” he said. “We want kids to be able to eat. We want to continue to invest in job-creating infrastructure. But we aren’t going to negotiate against ourselves as Democrats. It is on the backs of the Republicans, who are bragging about having a trifecta, to admit that having a trifecta means nothing.”
Rep. Suzan DelBene
The leader of House Democrats’ campaign arm for a second two-year term, DelBene represents some of Seattle’s wealthiest suburbs and areas along the I-5 corridor to the city’s north. She said her office has been getting “thousands of calls across our region from folks who are terrified about what’s happening.”
“Trump said he was going to lower costs, but we’ve seen costs go up, and things like tariffs are only going to raise costs even more,” she said.
Democrats need to highlight the impact of those policies on Washington, she said, a highly trade-dependent state with a strong economic relationship with Canada. Those considerations should guide how Democrats vote, the congresswoman added.
“When we’re talking about what the right legislation is, what we need to do, it’s fundamentally based on what our communities need,” she said. “And so I do think that it’s really important that we do that, and that’s going to be the discussion that we’re going to have on these bills.”
DelBene said Democrats should also be wary that even if they strike a deal with Republicans for a bipartisan appropriations package, Trump has shown that he may not respect Congress’ so-called “power of the purse” and refuse to implement the programs approved by lawmakers. Because House Republicans have only a slim majority that is getting smaller as some of its members join the Trump administration, she said the onus is on the GOP.
“Are they here to legislate and to stand up – we are an independent branch of government – or are they here just to sit back and let the Trump administration do whatever they want?” she said. “I’m not sure Republicans have decided where they stand there, but we’re going to continue to fight for legislation that helps our communities and make sure that we’re funding important programs that help our communities, and do that in a fiscally responsible way.”
Sen. Maria Cantwell
Cantwell wasn’t available for an interview, but Washington’s junior senator and the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee spent the week criticizing the Trump administration’s aggressive use of tariffs and efforts to slash the federal government. In an interview on CNBC on Thursday, she likened Musk’s government efficiency initiative to doing surgery with a hammer.
“This is the fourth week of the Trump administration, and I would hope that we would have been hearing about how we’re lowering costs on housing, food prices and drugs, and instead, we’re now in – it almost seems like a tariff tantrum, like we’re just going to tariff everything,” Cantwell said, after Trump imposed a 25% tax on steel and aluminum imports from U.S. allies and adversaries alike.
After taking a relatively conciliatory approach in her committee’s confirmation hearing of billionaire investment banker Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department, Cantwell opposed the nomination, citing Lutnick’s support for Trump’s tariff-heavy economic approach and his reluctance to commit to allocating money Congress already approved in a bipartisan 2022 bill aimed at boosting scientific research and domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
The second-term Democrat, who represents a district whose voters preferred Trump in each of the last three presidential elections, also wasn’t available for an interview. In a statement on Friday marking the 30th anniversary of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of politically moderate and mostly rural Democrats that she co-leads, Gluesenkamp Perez echoed the frustration that has caused many Trump voters to support Musk’s purported goal of rooting out waste and fraud in the federal government.
“For 30 years, Blue Dogs have put loyalty to place over loyalty to party politics, and we’ve held a set of beliefs that don’t always fit neatly in one bucket,” she said. “Our Coalition is working to break through D.C. gridlock by meeting folks where they’re at with policies most Americans agree on. As a Co-Chair of the Coalition, I look forward to taking on wasteful government spending, fighting for the trades, and building the political power of ordinary Americans.”
With Republicans likely to need Democratic votes to pass virtually any legislation that doesn’t have unanimous support among GOP lawmakers, Gluesenkamp Perez and her 10-member coalition could wield outsize influence in negotiations. In her first term, she voted across party lines more often than other Democrats but mostly voted with her party.