Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-11th, doesn’t want the federal government to shut down on Tuesday night because his Northern Virginia district would be one of worst hit by the economic fallout.
But Walkinshaw, elected earlier this month in 50-point landslide, said it’s already too late to prevent the pain that President Donald Trump has inflicted on federal employees, contractors and the local businesses that depend on them since returning to the White House eight months ago.
“My honest answer is, for a lot of my constituents today, Trump already has shut down the federal government,” he said. Walkinshaw cited the elimination of the Agency for International Development, the crippling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the gutting of the Department of Education.
Walkinshaw, who served as chief of staff for then-Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-11th, for 11 years, and served two terms on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, said the damage to the federal government is not just an issue for the Virginians who live in the 11th Congressional District, including most of Fairfax County and all of Fairfax City.
He said the fallout from Trump’s actions will be felt statewide.
“All of Virginia has a stake in Northern Virginia’s continued economic success,” he said in an interview, citing the outsize amount of support that tax dollars from the state’s most affluent region provide for public schools and other services across Virginia.
In addition to federal workers in Hampton Roads and other parts of the state, he said, “The federal workforce is every day delivering services that every American needs, including every Virginian.”
Potential shutdown
Walkinshaw, like other Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, blames the brinkmanship on the president, who initially agreed to meet with Democratic leaders in an effort to head off a shutdown and then abruptly canceled the meeting. Trump said he thought a meeting with Democratic leaders would not be productive. House and Senate Democratic leaders are trying to reinforce health care funds as part of a deal.
Trump and Republicans say Democrats would be responsible if the Senate rejects the stopgap funding resolution that the House of Representatives passed more than a week ago to avoid a shutdown.
“I don’t want to see a shutdown, but I think that Trump is pushing us toward a shutdown by refusing to even meet with Democrats,” he said.
For a congressman who’s been in office less than three weeks, Walkinshaw, 42, appears undaunted by the challenge. He said he’s following the model that Connolly set during his 16 years in Congress before his death from esophageal cancer in May, including winning appointment to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on which his mentor had long served.
The committee garners plenty of headlines because of its frequent role in high-profile disputes between presidents and Congress, but it holds a special interest in the laws and rules that apply to the federal workforce, which in Walkinshaw’s district numbers more than 80,000 people, not including employees of federal contractors.
“It’s also where a lot of the nuts-and-bolts work is done relative to federal employees and contractors (who are) so important to our economy,” he said.
Targeting DOGE
Walkinshaw was sworn in as a member of Congress on Sept. 10, the day after winning 75% of the vote in a special election to choose a successor to Connolly. The same day, he filed his first piece of legislation, named the “Limit on Sweeping Executive Reorganization Act,” to prevent a future president from using executive orders to unilaterally slash the federal workforce and spending without the consent of Congress.
The legislation is aimed directly at DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a government department created by Congress. It’s a political operation that Trump created on top of an unrelated White House office and turned over to Elon Musk, who became the public face of DOGE, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate who stepped down in January to run for governor of Ohio. Ramaswamy appeared this month in Virginia at a rally in Chesterfield County for Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, and her running mates John Reid and Attorney General Jason Miyares.
The legislation would require Congress to review and approve any executive action that would reduce an agency’s workforce by 5% or more, or cut its operating budget by at least 10%.
Walkinshaw also became a co-sponsor of the “Delete DOGE Act,” which would repeal the executive framework for the cost-cutting initiative.
Neither piece of legislation has much chance of getting through the Republican-controlled Congress, much less getting Trump’s signature to become law. But he said he’s looking beyond the current Congress to the next one, after the midterm elections next year that will serve as a public referendum on the president’s first two years back in office.
“I’m an eternal optimist,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the Republican majority in Congress will recognize that the DOGE experiment has failed.”
“If not, part of my goal is to have a package of legislation that is teed up and ready to go in a future Democratic-controlled Congress,” he said.
Again, Walkinshaw said he’s drawing on lessons from Connolly, who was a tenacious fighter for federal employees.
“One of the lessons I learned from him is, if you’re going to seek an elected office, you have to do it with every fiber of your mind, body and spirit,” he said. “That is what he brought to work every single day. I try to follow that and do the same.”
The bridge
Connolly was chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 2006 when Walkinshaw first met him in his role as campaign manager for Andrew Hurst, a Democrat who was challenging Rep. Tom Davis, R-11th, who won by a comfortable 12-percentage point margin.
Two years later, when Davis announced that he was retiring from Congress after seven terms, Walkinshaw managed Connolly’s first campaign for the seat. After Connolly won, Davis hired Walkinshaw to manage the transition.
“I was kind of the bridge between his office and Gerry’s office,” he said.
Walkinshaw said he and the former Republican congressman are friends now, but Davis joked that he’s told him, ” ‘James, all I’ve got to do is let out that you worked for me and (politically) you’re a dead man.’ ”
Walkinshaw was born in Fairfax, but spent most of his youth in Prince William County in Gainesville, near the Manassas National Battlefield Park. He earned a degree in political science at New York University.
As a freshman, he was living in a dormitory near Washington Square in Greenwich Village on Sept. 11, 2011, when terrorists hijacked two passenger jets and flew them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. He was on his way to class when the first plane hit and a security guard advised him to go back to his room.
“I could smell the smoke and hear the sirens, so I have very vivid memories of it,” he said.
Walkinshaw, who returned to Fairfax to live after Connolly joined Congress in 2009, said he’s still “not quite” used to being called congressman.
Davis, the former Republican congressman for the district, gives credit to Walkinshaw for his “hustle” and “maturity.”
“I think he’s well-seasoned,” Davis said. “He knows the job pretty well.”