A government shutdown is looming. Here’s what Democrats and Republicans need to sort out to prevent it.

Congress has a hefty to-do list now that it has returned from its August break. Nothing on the agenda looms larger than avoiding a government shutdown.

Government funding runs out at the end of this month, which gives lawmakers only a few weeks to sort out a number of thorny issues that could keep an agreement from coming together. Republicans control both houses of Congress, but they’ll need at least some Democrats on board to get to 60 votes in the Senate and overcome the filibuster.

Congress plays chicken with shutdowns on a relatively regular basis, but usually finds a solution before the deadline hits. The last time it failed was in 2018, when disagreements over border wall funding set off a 35-day shutdown, which saw hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without pay, widespread disruptions throughout government agencies and billions of dollars in lost economic growth.

The divides in Congress right now, both between parties and within them, are so wide that the risks of a shutdown may be greater this time around than in other recent standoffs.

“I think there’s a serious risk of a shutdown … the House and the Senate are way behind schedule,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told Yahoo Finance Tuesday morning.

The online betting site Polymarket is forecasting a nearly 75% chance that the government will shut down on Oct. 1.

Here are some of the most important questions that need to be answered by the end of this month if Congress wants to avoid having the government run out of money.

Will Democrats play ball?

The filibuster means that Republicans can’t pass anything unless at least seven Democrats vote in favor. Nine Democrats — including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — joined the GOP to avoid a shutdown earlier this year. That decision sparked an uproar within the Democratic base, which might make them wary of doing it again.

Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent a letter to Republicans on Tuesday in which they said they are “willing to work in a bipartisan way to keep our government open.” But media reports suggest that there are strong disagreements within the Democratic Party over whether they should be willing to help the GOP at all.

Can Republicans keep their own caucus together?

Whatever Democrats do, the GOP will have to stay unified for any spending bill to have a chance of passing. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have their own internal divisions to work out if they want to get their party on the same page.

Reports suggest that Republicans are currently divided over whether they should put forward a short-term bill that effectively kicks the funding can down the road for a few months or a longer-term bill that keeps the government funded for at least a year. The GOP will also have to decide whether it wants to pass a “clean” extension that keeps funding at current levels or the party they should try to tack on earmarks that include some new spending for specific projects.

Can Democrats secure any concessions?

Some Democrats have argued that their party should use their leverage in shutdown negotiations to undo parts of Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill that Republicans unilaterally passed over the summer. What they might demand, and the odds that they might get it, are unclear.

Progressive Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren said last month that she would only vote for a spending bill that reverses hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cuts to Medicaid. “They can start by restoring the health care that they ripped away to finance more tax handouts for billionaires,” she told Punchbowl News last month.

Other Democrats are reportedly trying to force the GOP to include an extension for Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year. If those subsidies are allowed to end, premiums for plans under the ACA are expected to spike by an average of 75%.

Will other issues get in the way?

The shutdown isn’t the only major issue that Congress is dealing with now that it’s back from break. The August recess created a pause in the furor over investigations into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, but the House picked up right where it left off on Tuesday in the effort to have files related to Epstein’s sex crimes unsealed.

Over in the Senate, a lingering deadlock over the confirmation of Trump’s nominees may be about to come to a head. Democrats have prevented dozens of the president’s picks from getting a confirmation vote, but GOP leaders say they are looking at using the “nuclear option” to overcome the Democratic blockade.

Neither of these issues directly concerns the government’s budget, but they could eat up precious legislative time in both houses of Congress and raise tensions between the parties in a way that might undermine the chances of a deal getting done.

What will Trump’s role be?

Historically, presidents have worked to avoid government shutdowns because of the disruption they cause and the political blowback that can result. That may not be the case with Trump. Before the 2018 shutdown, Trump said he would be “proud” to bring the government to a halt in order to get funding for his border wall.

More recently, he said he would meet with Democratic leaders to try to negotiate a spending deal, but added that it would be “almost a waste of time” because they weren’t likely to come to an agreement.

“The key to a deal usually is to have the White House brokering that deal, and it doesn’t appear to my eye that the White House cares a lot about avoiding a shutdown,” Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director, told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday.

Democrats may also be hesitant to agree to any deal with Trump after watching his administration take unprecedented steps to slash government spending, shutter agencies and rescind congressionally approved funding since he returned to the White House.

Who gets the blame?

Funding negotiations always include a lot of finger-pointing as each side looks to convince the public that their opponents are responsible for shutting down the government. It’s too early to know who might shoulder the blame if the current standoff leads to a shutdown, but past polling does not bode well for Republicans.

“The public has always blamed and soured on the GOP more than Democrats,” Nathaniel Rakich of 538 wrote in a 2023 analysis of past shutdowns. Polls conducted in the midst of the 2018 shutdown showed that voters blamed Trump more than anyone else. However, a more recent look at the political impact of shutdowns by Bridget Bowman of NBC News suggests that lawmakers rarely pay a significant price even when voters think a shutdown was their fault.