Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Thursday that he plans to support the GOP funding bill, lowering the odds of a government shutdown.

“For sure the Republican bill is a terrible option,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take … much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.”

Schumer has privately told senators there are enough Democratic votes to avert a shutdown, according to three people with knowledge of the interactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid disclosing private discussions.

The federal government is set to shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday unless lawmakers pass a bill to keep it open. Senate Republicans are likely to need eight Democrats to join them in order to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, and only one Democrat aside from Schumer has publicly said he will support the bill.

The announcement comes just a day after Schumer said there were not enough Democrats to support the bill and as the caucus faces intense pressure from liberal grassroots voters and Democratic members of the House to oppose it.

Schumer has presided over three days of wrenching debate among Senate Democrats over their political quandary, which he called a “Hobson’s choice.” Many senators argued passionately against voting for the Republican funding bill, which passed the House with just one Democratic vote earlier this week. They pointed out that the funding bill lacks directives included in regular appropriations bills that dictate how money can be spent, which would enable President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to lay off government workers and seek to eliminate programs without congressional input.

Other Democrats fear that a government shutdown would empower Trump and Musk to make further cuts by giving Trump the power to determine which government employees are “essential” and must keep working during a shutdown and which are “nonessential.”

Schumer warned his caucus there would be no “off-ramp” for Democrats if they allowed the government to shut down, given Republicans control both chambers of Congress, he told reporters. He also said the closure could drag on for “months and months.”

“I think they want to use the shutdown to decimate the federal government,” he said of Republicans.

Many Senate Democrats announced Thursday that they will not support the bill. “I think when you confront a bully, you have to confront a bully, and I’m not going to vote for this,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (New Mexico). “But I fully respect people who’ve come to a different conclusion.”

With the clock ticking, and as more Democrats came out against the funding bill, Schumer spent Thursday meeting one-on-one with his members to gauge their support for averting a shutdown, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.

Schumer said he planned to ask for amendment votes from Republicans on the funding bill, including a vote on a 30-day stopgap funding bill. That vote would fail but provide a symbolic act of resistance before the GOP funding bill passed.

Some Democrats have criticized that amendment plan.

“It’s really all about pandering to the base,” Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania), who is the only Democrat other than Schumer who has said he’ll vote for the Republican bill, said in an interview Thursday morning.

Some House Democrats have also bashed the strategy. “Those games won’t fool anyone,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) wrote on X. “It won’t trick voters, it won’t trick House members. People will not forget it.”

House Democrats said they had called their senators to urge them to vote against the bill, outraged that their colleagues in the Senate might support a bill that they believe will enrage their liberal base and hurt their ability to push back against Republican plans, according to lawmakers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The House passed the Republican funding bill with a single Democratic vote. The bill includes $13 billion in cuts to nondefense spending that Democrats have criticized.

Republicans have argued that Democrats would be blamed for any shutdown.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) took to the Senate floor Thursday to remind senators that Schumer warned in 2019 that shutting down the government over policy differences “accomplishes nothing but pain and suffering for the country and incurs an enormous political cost to the party shutting it down.” Now Schumer is trying to lead Senate Democrats “over the cliff and hurt the American public in the process,” Barrasso said.

Trump echoed Senate Republicans in remarks in the Oval Office on Thursday. “If there’s a shutdown, it’s only because of the Democrats,” he said.

But some Democrats argued that Republicans would get the blame.

The GOP controls the White House, the Senate and the House. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that 32 percent of registered voters would blame Democrats in Congress for a shutdown, 31 percent would blame Republicans in Congress and 22 percent would blame Trump.

Schumer and other Democrats have called for Republicans to pass a four-week stopgap funding bill so lawmakers can complete their work, an idea that Republicans have refused to consider.

“Republicans didn’t do their work,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), an Appropriations Committee member, told reporters, previewing the party’s argument if the government shuts down. “They have an obligation to work with Democrats, and instead they put a partisan [continuing resolution] on the floor.”

Despite his criticisms of Democrats’ potential strategy, Fetterman said he recognized that Schumer was caught between the anger of the Democratic base and the desire to prevent a shutdown that Democrats might be blamed for.

Schumer is “trying to walk in between all of that,” he said.

Patrick Svitek, Mariana Alfaro and Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.