United States President Donald Trump has seized on the government shutdown as an opportunity to reshape the federal workforce and punish detractors, posting on social media his intent to cut what he described as “Democrat agencies”.
On Thursday, Trump used his post on Truth Social to announce he would meet with budget director Russ Vought to talk through “temporary or permanent” spending cuts that could set up a lose-lose dynamic for Democratic lawmakers.
He wrote that he and Vought would determine “which of the many Democrat Agencies” would be cut — continuing their efforts to slash federal spending by threatening mass firings of workers and suggesting “irreversible” cuts to Democratic priorities.
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump said. “They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
The post was notable in its explicit embrace of Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation that Trump distanced himself from during his 2024 re-election campaign.
The effort aimed to reshape the federal government around right-wing policies, and Democrats repeatedly pointed to its goals to warn of the consequences of a second Trump administration.
Vought on Wednesday offered an opening salvo of the pressure he hoped to put on Democrats. He announced he was withholding $18bn for the Hudson River rail tunnel and Second Avenue subway line in New York City, which have been championed by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his House counterpart Hakeem Jeffries, in their home state.
Vought is also cancelling $8bn in green energy projects in states with Democratic senators.
Meanwhile, the White House is preparing for mass firings of federal workers, rather than simply furloughing it as is the usual practice during a shutdown. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week that layoffs were “imminent”.
“If they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government,” Leavitt said on Thursday of Democrats.
Trump’s announcement on his Truth Social website came with the government entering the second day of a stoppage that is expected to see 750,000 employees being sent home without pay across a wide range of agencies.
Leavitt told reporters on Thursday the job cuts were likely going to number “in the thousands”.
Schumer and Jeffries, meanwhile, have dismissed the job cuts threat as an attempt at intimidation and said the mass firings would not stand up in court.
“These are all things that the Trump administration has been doing since January 20th,” said Jeffries, referring to the president’s first day in office. “The cruelty is the point.”
The Senate is not voting on Thursday because of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, but another vote is expected on Friday and on most days until the standoff is resolved.
Five additional Democratic votes would be needed to reach the 60-vote threshold in the 100-member Senate to greenlight a bill the House passed in September.
With Democrats expected to block the Republican reopening plan again, Republicans were reportedly mulling sending their senators home after the vote — effectively guaranteeing the shutdown drags into next week.
But House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose members have been off all week, told reporters that Senate leaders need to stick to an initial plan to work through the weekend in Washington.
“And the House is coming back next week, hoping that they will be sending us something to work on, that we can get back to work and do the people’s business,” Johnson told a news conference at the US Capitol.
He blamed Democrats and said “they have effectively turned off the legislative branch” and “handed it over to the president”.
For now, Democrats are holding fast to their demands to preserve healthcare funding and refusing to back a bill that fails to do so, warning of price spikes for millions of Americans nationwide.
With no easy endgame at hand, the standoff risks dragging deeper into October, when federal workers who remain on the job will begin missing paycheques. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated roughly 750,000 federal workers would be furloughed on any given day during the shutdown, a loss of $400m daily in wages.
The economic effects could spill over into the broader economy. Past shutdowns saw “reduced aggregate demand in the private sector for goods and services, pushing down GDP”, the CBO said.
“Stalled federal spending on goods and services led to a loss of private-sector income that further reduced demand for other goods and services in the economy,” it said.
Overall CBO said there was a “dampening of economic output”, but that reversed once people returned to work.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told CNBC on Thursday that the shutdown could hurt US economic growth.
“This isn’t the way to have a discussion, shutting down the government and lowering the GDP,” he said.
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