Thank you for clarifying that this removes the requirement to spend the money where it was allocated. This answers my question and could indeed be worse than a shutdown.

Most MAGA Republicans would rather a shutdown than giving in to Democratic points. The alternative wasn’t Democrats getting one or two of their points in the budget in exchange for it passing, the alternative was a government shutdown.

I fully agree that when the Democrats have power they do absolutely nothing with it, but in this case I fail to see how they could have gotten any of their points in.

So although passing this budget was obviously terrible, how is it worse than no budget at all? No budget followed by a government shutdown would be the ideal case for Trump and Elon to take yet more power from Congress. The Democrats aren’t in any good position of power right now so expecting the budget to include any of their priorities is unrealistic.