The federal shutdown is dragging into its fourth week with no end in sight. TSA workers are not getting paid for screening airport passengers’ bags for contraband. National parks are asking tourists for donations. Prospective homebuyers are struggling to secure flood insurance. Start-ups are idling, figuring out if they can go public.
As much of America stalls and sputters, President Donald Trump is forging ahead on a plan to remake the government’s budget without Congress’s assent. His administration has used the shutdown as a pretext to withhold billions of dollars from scores of projects: a subway line in Manhattan, a utility microgrid in Oahu. The White House has diverted anti-terrorism money to red states and canceled clean-energy projects in blue states. Trump’s goal is not only to make the government smaller again but also to alter the country’s economic geography, pushing Democratic regions to falter and Republican ones to flourish.
None of this is subtle. “We’re cutting Democrat programs that we didn’t want, because, I mean, they made one mistake,” Trump said, referring to Democratic legislators who declined to vote for the GOP’s spending proposals. “They didn’t realize that that gives me the right to cut.”
Democrats may have made plenty of mistakes, but they did not give the president the right to axe congressionally approved programs when they declined to vote for the GOP’s appropriations proposals. The legislature retains the power to decide how much money to collect from taxpayers and how to spend it.
And what’s true during the shutdown is true when the government is open too: Congress is supposed to have control of the purse. Nevertheless, the shutdown rescissions are merely Trump’s latest effort to use the federal budget to punish Democratic places and voters. In recent months, the administration has sued, investigated, or defunded bastions of the left—universities, scientific-research institutions, think tanks, museums, media outlets, law offices, civic nonprofits, green-energy companies, the civil service. It has gone after “woke” functions of the government, such as agencies aiding Black families and supporting clean-energy production. And it has pulled dollars from Democratic areas and pushed them to Republican ones: moving Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, closing five of the 10 regional offices of the Department of Health and Human Services—specifically, the ones based in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.
Now Trump has used the lapse in appropriations to declare a kind of budgetary free-for-all. Russell Vought, the White House budget chief, has directed the Army Corps of Engineers to pause “over $11 billion in lower-priority projects” in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore—those cities, again! The White House has frozen money for the renovation and expansion of the railway tunnels connecting New York and New Jersey, arguing that “unconstitutional DEI principles” were used in the financing process. Work on the tunnels is already under way; a cofferdam the size of an oil tanker is anchored in the Hudson.
Again, the White House is not supposed to have a magic line-item eraser that allows it to alter congressional spending plans. That was true when DOGE’s unvetted stooges fired thousands of civil servants and kneecapped entire agencies during Trump’s first weeks in office. It was true when the White House delayed or canceled financing for elementary schools, libraries, weather-forecasting programs, and NIH research projects earlier this year. It’s true today.
Although, in some cases, the courts have allowed the White House to slash programmatic financing and reduce head counts, judges are still likely to force Trump to release some of the money he’s refusing to spend during the shutdown. If they do not, Trump’s vindictive budgeting might slow down projects and inconvenience millions of Americans, including New York’s commuters. But the rescissions will total perhaps $30 billion— a rounding error in terms of the nation’s GDP and a sliver of the $1 trillion the government spends on nondefense discretionary programs each year.
In a broader sense, and despite his vindictive intentions, Trump’s economic project actually threatens red districts more than blue ones. His signature second-term domestic-policy package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, slashes the Medicaid budget by close to $1 trillion, which means that hundreds of small-town hospitals in Appalachia and clinics in the Deep South might not be able to keep their doors open. Two of the three states expected to see the largest increases in their uninsured populations are Kentucky and Louisiana.
Right now, Republicans are extending the shutdown to deny insurance subsidies to families that purchase health coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. If the GOP succeeds, an estimated 20 million households will see their premiums rise next year. South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, and Utah would be hardest hit, the Kaiser Family Foundation has estimated.
Trump’s trade war has functioned as a sales tax on every single American household. The average family will pay $1,800 more a year for groceries, clothing, and other common goods thanks to the tariffs. But manufacturers and farmers have so far borne the brunt of the pain. Input prices have soared: The costs of fertilizer, machinery, lumber, aluminum, steel, and auto parts have risen. Export demand has plunged as the United States’ trading partners have put retaliatory tariffs in place. The agricultural sector is in the midst of a quiet recession; the manufacturing sector is shedding jobs. Bright-red states such as Iowa, South Dakota, and Indiana are getting the worst of it.
Trump might want to use his executive power to damage the country’s blue islands and coastal elites, but the places he’s harming the most are the very ones that powered his rise. No one should feel any schadenfreude, however, because pain in red states will spill over into blue states, and pain in blue states will spill over into red ones. A farm failing in Iowa has a way of increasing the cost of breakfast in Los Angeles. A hospital closing in Louisiana means fewer job opportunities for health aides training in Seattle. A cut to heavy-infrastructure spending in New Jersey might depress sales for a machinery business in Ohio. An HHS office shutting down in San Francisco might mean falling IT spending in Virginia. The country’s economy is more interconnected than Trump realizes, and its polity more indivisible than he might think too: There are more Republicans in California than there are in the Deep South. More Texans and Floridians voted for Kamala Harris than did residents of New England.
In the United States’ economy, there’s no way to separate “us” from “them.” When Trump signs bills that help the rich and hurt the poor, he ends up hurting everyone. When he punishes blue places, he damages red ones too. We’re in this together, whether Trump sees it that way or not.
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