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“We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that.

Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.”

Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say.

This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.)

Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial.

Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy.

Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible.

Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance.

The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying.

And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it?

Related:

The conversation Democrats need to have The Democrats’ “No We Can’t” strategy

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. Tesla needs a better story. Musk’s Madisonian insight—and its troubling consequences Radio Atlantic: Gaza is struggling to keep clean water flowing.

Today’s News

A federal judge ordered six federal agencies to reinstate the probationary employees they fired last month. He criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the mass layoffs, calling it a “sham.” The White House withdrew Dave Weldon’s nomination to be the director of the CDC. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of lower-court orders that largely blocked Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor, some restrictions on birthright citizenship could take effect.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), Serena Dai writes: “By putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty.

Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself

By Nicholas B. Dirks

The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The ongoing stalemate over extending a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has 2 million people still trapped in the rubble-strewn Gaza Strip with dwindling medical, food, and water supplies. Last week the Israeli government cut off all aid into Gaza in an attempt to force Hamas to agree to its terms. This week, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen ordered all electric power cut off to Gaza, a move that affects a very crucial piece of remaining infrastructure: a desalination plant.

In the throes of war, it can be hard to keep track of any one element of harm or destruction. There are so many places to look. But for people like Marwan Bardawil, his focus on just one thing—his job—is also his salvation, “All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues.”

For nearly 30 years, Bardawil has worked to grow and stabilize the water sector in Gaza.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we learn more about the dire water situation in Gaza through the experience of one man who until now has managed to keep finding ways to get clean water into Gaza.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: With every day that goes by, the cease-fire in Gaza—if we can even still call it that—seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan. American diplomats met with Hamas. But so far, no agreement, and no consensus, and for the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day.

About a week ago, Israel has once again cut off power, which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza, and power helps bring them clean water, and clean water helps keep them alive.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bardawil. He is a water engineer in Gaza, someone who was regularly calculating inflows, outflows; reviewing plans; and engineering new ideas to keep Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war—whatever is going on politically.

And something about this bureaucrat, trying day after day to keep the water on, really captured the growing desperation of the war. Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7 and continued to get more impossible by the day.

When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza. Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south. And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, caught up with him to try to learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people.

Claudine, welcome to the show.

Claudine Ebeid: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Claudine, there’s so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves—the thousands who have had their lives upended during the war. I know many have left the country. What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave?

Ebeid: Well, just to remind listeners, Marwan is 61 years old, he’s a father and grandfather, and he and his family were living in the north of Gaza, which was where Israel first launched its retaliatory attack to the October 7 attacks. So five days into the war, under Israeli air strikes, Marwan, his adult children, and two of his granddaughters—they flee the north on foot to the south of Gaza. Then, last summer, like almost a hundred thousand other Palestinians, he decides to flee once more, but this time from Gaza to Egypt.

Marwan Bardawil: I’m one of them: no house. And when you lost—when your house has become a rubble, you don’t just lose your house. You lost your house, your memories. So it’s just—it’s like you moved having nothing; you lost everything. Just, you are here; it’s like you saved your body from physical death.

Ebeid: Many people fled to Egypt in this little sliver of a window where the border was open, and people planned to get out through basically this company—this Egyptian company—charging US$5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child to get people out. So, you know, it’s not an altruistic endeavor.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ebeid: Ultimately, there were two reasons that really pushed Marwan to leave. From the professional side, he was starting to get pressure—counsel, I think, is the right word—from his boss that if he could get out, he should, because his work was really valuable to them, and they needed him alive.

Rosin: Oof.

Ebeid: The second reason was this moment that he described to me, where he was driving in his car, and the car in front of him exploded. You know, shrapnel from the car busted through his windshield and injured his shoulder. And I think it was just too close of call. You know, when he described that moment to me, he said three weeks later, he and his family—they were gone.

[Music]

Rosin: How did water work in Gaza before the war? Because I recall from talking to him that it wasn’t easy, even in the best of non-war circumstances, to keep water flowing.

Ebeid: It’s true. Water was never a sure thing in Gaza. It’s a total patchwork of a system there. Basically, they have a combination of water sources.

One is coming from Israel. That’s about 10 percent of their water, and that comes from three main connection points. The rest is coming from groundwater that gets treated. So the Palestinian Water Authority says that before the war, there were 306 groundwater wells as primary sources of water. They also have three desalination plants. They’re situated along the coast, and they’re basically treating seawater. The output is not huge.

And then they also have a lot of small-scale desalination plants and water tankers that are, you know, just kind of filling in the gaps. So it’s not an ideal system. You have a lot of moving parts. And the source water that you’re starting with is already not a great starting point.

Rosin: How much water did make it to Palestinians with that arrangement?

Ebeid: The average person in Gaza was getting around 80 liters of water a day. And most Americans—we use about 300 liters of water a day.

Rosin: Oh.

Ebeid: So that’s what was going on before October 7.

Rosin: Right, so that was the baseline before the war. Then comes October 7, and you’ve described the intense bombing campaigns that destroyed a lot of the north. How did that situation look in the eyes of a water engineer?

Ebeid: So pipes are getting blown up, and teams are rushing out to try to repair what they can, what damage is happening in various locations, and they don’t know what they’re walking into. We do know that there were two separate occasions in which workers who were either doing a water repair or heading to a repair were killed.

So the conditions were really dangerous. And I’m sure you and many people have seen images of the destruction in Gaza. And when I was in Egypt, Marwan shared some of his photos with me.

Ebeid: (Gasps.) Oh my God. It’s rubble.

Bardawil: Yeah.

Ebeid: This is the Palestinian Water Authority office in Gaza?

Bardawil: In Gaza, yes.

Ebeid: So the office itself got destroyed?

Bardawil: Yeah, it’s destroyed.

Ebeid: By the summer of 2024, almost every connection point, every desalination plant, every sewage station had either been totally destroyed or had sustained some amount of damage.

Rosin: So what did that mean for the people who were trapped in Gaza? Because there were still about 2 million people there. How did that change their lives?

Ebeid: This kind of massive destruction of water infrastructure—it does not just affect the water supply; it also leads to diseases. So by the summer of last year, we know that about 600,000 cases of acute diarrhea were reported and 40,000 cases of hepatitis A.

And those are diseases that come from contamination of water and from having an open sewage system. And then around that same time, humanitarian aid workers become extremely concerned because they find that a 10-month-old baby has tested positive for polio. And polio is something that can spread through contaminated water. And this was the first confirmed case in Gaza of polio in a quarter of a century. So they go on a massive campaign to vaccinate kids for polio, and that campaign is still ongoing today.

[Music]

Rosin: Now we’re a few weeks into the cease-fire. Maybe it’s a precarious cease-fire. It’s not really clear. What’s the current water situation?

Ebeid: For most of the war, people were getting somewhere near 3 liters of water a day, which is so little, and that was for cooking, for hygiene, for drinking. After the cease-fire, in January, some people in Gaza were starting to get around 7 to 10 liters a day.

Rosin: So a little bit better.

Ebeid: A little bit better. You know, not a crazy jump, but it was an improvement.

Last month, when I checked in with the Palestinian Water Authority, at least one connection point with Israel was flowing again, and one main desalination plant was reconnected to Israel’s power grid. And so that was helping.

Rosin: Okay.

Ebeid: But this week, as you mentioned, Israel cut off the electricity to that desalination plant. So it’s very possible the water situation could turn dire again very quickly.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ebeid: I will say that Marwan and his colleagues at the PWA do have a six-month plan that they have started implementing during this cease-fire. Whether they can continue to implement that plan is really up in the air at this moment.

Rosin: Even the fact that they have a six-month plan seems really important to note, because what that symbolizes is Gazans rebuilding for themselves, as opposed to the other visions, which are the U.S. or somebody else doing it for them, right?

Ebeid: Right. Trump’s vision is a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” as he called it. And in that plan, he talks about displacing all of the Palestinians that live in Gaza, and having them get absorbed by Arab countries, and then the U.S. taking ownership of Gaza. And, you know, presumably then whoever Trump wants to contract with will come in and rebuild Gaza.

However, last week, Arab countries came together in Egypt, and they agreed on a plan that could potentially include the water authority. They say their plan will cost $53 billion. It would be one that calls for rebuilding Gaza in a way that doesn’t displace Gazans, and it calls for a Palestinian government to manage the rebuilding. So that vision: very different from Trump’s vision. That vision is a vision of Gazans rebuilding Gaza.

Rosin: Okay, so there’s all this destroyed infrastructure, and there are competing visions for how to rebuild it. How does Marwan fit into all of this?

Ebeid: You know, Marwan has been building and rebuilding the water infrastructure for decades. You know, one of the reasons that I was interested in following him was that his personal life and his career really kind of let you see the track of what happened in Gaza since 1993.

President Bill Clinton: On behalf of the United States and Russia, co-sponsors of the Middle East peace process, welcome to this great occasion of history and hope.

Ebeid: The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. And this was a really important moment.

Clinton: We know a difficult road lies ahead. Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation. But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends. And the Quran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.

Ebeid: At that time, there was hope. There was hope that this would be an area that would be able to govern itself; it would be able to build for itself; it would be able to think about its infrastructure for itself. And Marwan’s life and his career sort of map out what happened.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: Marwan was right to be hopeful once, even though he wasn’t working with all that much. What does it look like to push through this time around, with even less?

[Break]

Rosin: Claudine, Marwan has been working on water in Gaza for, like, 30 years. So he knows how to operate with very few resources, very little autonomy. But still, I bet in the early days, like during the Oslo Accords, in the ’90s, the spirit of his work was probably really different.

Ebeid: Right.

Rosin: Did you talk to Marwan about this? Was there a younger Marwan who had a lot of energy and optimism, and was very excited about Gazans building Gaza?

Ebeid: Yeah, you know, he was born and raised in Gaza, studied water engineering in Gaza, and left for a small time to go be a water engineer abroad. After the Oslo Accords are signed, he sees this as his opportunity to come home and to put his engineering abilities to work in Gaza.

He’s there raising a family, and he describes, you know, the beginning as a very heady time. There was an idea that the Palestinian Authority was in charge, and that they were going to be able to build a water system.

Ebeid: Can you remember that time?

Bardawil: Of course I remember. And I remember we put a five-year plan, short term and long term, for the water sector in Palestine.

And I remember that I was in a team that consists of 11 persons. We had seven male and four female. And we are sitting in a hotel, and the hotel is like an office, because there was no offices at the time. We used to work ’til midnight on a daily basis.

We believed in the peace process. We believed that this process will continue and will end with something good.

Ebeid: That was the part that just hit me in my heart. When he is describing to me, like, they are young; they are full of hope. And he talks about getting plans from other small nations so that they can, you know, get an example of: What are the lessons learned? What are the things that we should be thinking about? Could you imagine? Like, We’ve studied to be water engineers, and now we get to, like, build our home’s water system.

Rosin: That’s an exciting thing. You get to do the thing that you care about most: bringing water to people, for your own people, in your own country. That’s a very powerful experience.

Ebeid: Yes, but more than a decade later, in 2006, Hamas wins an election, and with that comes a period of violence between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Eventually, Hamas controls Gaza. But the Palestinian Water Authority was allowed, I should say, by Hamas to continue doing its work. I think this is because they knew that the PWA knew what to do. They had the engineers, and people need water. And Marwan—he essentially keeps his head down during this time.

Rosin: What is it about him that just—did you get any insight into that? Like, what is it about him that just is able to keep focused on the task in these impossible situations?

Ebeid: I think Marwan is someone who feels a great responsibility—a great responsibility to the people of Gaza and also to his own family.

Bardawil: I am talking about myself. All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues, because it’s like, you will be burned by just thinking—

Ebeid: This is, like, your safe place, is to think about the water issues?

Bardawil: Yes, this is the safest.

Ebeid: I think it is a safe place to be to think about the thing that you have control over and you know what to do. And it’s based on plans, and it’s based on equations, and yes, sometimes it’s based on diplomatic effort and trying to get other countries to help you.

But it’s all in service of something that is a clear human necessity, which is water. And that is not something, to him, that is political. And yet, we are at this moment where politics will be the determining factor of whether people in Gaza will have access to water.

[Music]

Ebeid: Marwan is still working in what capacity he can for the water sector in Gaza from Cairo, but how long that will last is unknown. When and if Palestinians like him will be able to go back to Gaza is unknown. And the precariousness of this political moment for Gaza it’s really hard to overstate.

Rosin: Claudine, thank you so much for coming on.

Ebeid: Yeah. Thanks for having me to talk about this.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.