Thirty-four days into the previous government shutdown, in 2019, reporters asked President Donald Trump if he had a message for the thousands of federal employees who were about to miss another paycheck. “I love them. I respect them. I really appreciate the great job they’re doing,” he said at the time. The following day, caving after weeks of punishing cable-news coverage, he signed legislation to reopen the government, lauding furloughed employees as “incredible patriots,” pledging to quickly restore their back pay, and calling the moment “an opportunity for all parties to work together for the benefit of our whole beautiful, wonderful nation.”
Doesn’t really sound like the same guy, does it? This time, it took Trump fewer than 24 hours to turn a shutdown into a weapon wielded against the civil servants he once praised and the opposing party he has long derided. The administration has targeted Democratic districts, announcing holds on more than $25 billion in projects in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, and elsewhere, with more cuts believed to be on the way. Trump has threatened to fire government workers en masse, casting the lapse in funding that led to their furloughs as an “opportunity” to further decimate their ranks and gut agencies he doesn’t like. Officials have defied ethics guidelines, with blatantly partisan out-of-office messaging and banners blaming Democrats for the shutdown splashed across government websites.
This is what happens when a partial closure of the government meets the president’s second-term campaign to expand his powers and punish his enemies. The dynamic has created widespread uncertainty, as some Republicans blanch at the brazen norm-busting and some Democrats begin to reconsider how much pain they’re willing to bear in what they hoped would be a fight over health- care subsidies.
The president has shown no willingness to retreat, even as millions of federal workers and military troops are now working without pay or staying home. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote this morning on Truth Social, referring to the director of the Office of Management and Budget. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.” Compare that with Trump’s comments a year ago, during a presidential debate, when he said: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.”
Democrats have quite obviously taken note of Trump’s more aggressive tactics now that he’s president again, as has anyone paying attention. Last time around, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia told us, “there was none of this kind of activity, because there were people inside the White House who put guardrails on him.” Now those people are gone, and Trump has “people like Russ Vought, who’s whipping up a frenzy,” he said.
When we asked him whether Trump’s actions would lead the Democrats to reconsider their strategy of trying to force Republicans to negotiate before reopening the government, Warner would say only that he was “not going to predict” what would happen next. But at one point, he openly speculated about whether the federal workers he represents may eventually ask the Democrats to fold.
“I think we had to bring the fight—it’s about health care. But it’s spurred on by the fact that there are so many norms and laws that have been broken, and there’s so few times that you can actually join the fight,” he told us, adding that many of his constituents have encouraged him to stay in the fight, at least for now. “Now, but I’ll be the first to admit it: Will they still say that if this goes for two or three weeks? I don’t know.”
Even before the shutdown began yesterday, Trump-administration officials had begun working the levers of government to inflict pain on the Democrats. Vought appeared to be directing much of that activity. Two senior White House aides told us that Trump, though at times reluctant to elevate the fame of his staffers, likes Vought in the role of a “bad cop” and sees his eagerness to slash the bureaucracy as a potentially useful bargaining tool. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also warned Democrats about what they have unleashed, telling Politico that the party has effectively handed “the keys” of government to Vought.
Yesterday morning, the OMB director announced a freeze on $18 billion in federal grants for infrastructure projects in New York City, a move that New York Democrats blasted as nakedly partisan. Later that day, Vought announced that the government was canceling more than $7.5 billion in grants for green-energy projects. He listed all of the states that would be affected, including Democratic strongholds such as California and Illinois. (No state that Trump won last year will be affected.) The Department of Energy said in a statement that the cancellation of the 321 projects resulted from “a thorough, individualized financial review” and suggested that more projects will be reviewed for potential termination.
Vought has said that the shutdown will open the door for agencies to send out significant “reduction in force” notices, known as RIFs, and make permanent reductions to federal-agency staff. White House officials said those notices could begin going out imminently. But on a group video call yesterday, some federal workers at the Department of Health and Human Services were told that leaders had received no information about impending RIFs, according to a person on the call who requested anonymity to disclose internal communications.
Such layoffs would represent a major escalation and a departure from how previous shutdowns have been handled, Abigail André, the executive director of the Impact Project, which has been tracking the fate of federal workers during Trump’s second term, told us. “Best case, it’s a very serious threat,” she said a day before the shutdown. “Worst case, it’s thousands and thousands of more federal workers fired.” Trump’s post this morning suggested that he has not yet made up his mind on how many government jobs he wants to eliminate during the shutdown. (Federal-employee unions have already filed a lawsuit challenging the president’s authority to conduct mass layoffs during a lapse in funding.)
The president previewed the political nature of the push in the hours before the shutdown began, saying on Tuesday that a closed government would allow him to “do things” to Democrats that would be “bad for them and irreversible by them.” He said to reporters at the White House, “We’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be really affected, and they’re Democrats; they’re going to be Democrats.” Had there been any ambiguity about his plans, he also said that the shutdown would allow his administration to “get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want. And they’d be Democrat things.”
Although upwards of 600,000 federal employees have been furloughed, some were drafted into the partisan battle just before they were sent home. At the Small Business Administration, furloughed employees were told to adjust their out-of-office message to say that they would not be working “for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill,” according to a copy of the email we reviewed.
A banner on the Department of Agriculture’s main website says that the page will not be updated “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown,” echoing similar notes on the websites of other departments, including Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, and State. Critics have fumed that the messages violate Hatch Act regulations that limit the political activities of federal employees who work with taxpayer-funded programs. “There’s no question that it violates things like the Hatch Act and probably more,” Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that aims to strengthen the federal bureaucracy, told us.
Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, told us that the Trump administration’s “profoundly corrupt” actions make Richard Nixon “look like someone who revered the law.”
When we reached out to the White House press office for a response to such criticism, we received an automatically generated response. “Due to staff shortages resulting from the Democrat Shutdown, the typical 24/7 monitoring of this press inbox may experience delays,” the email, signed by the White House press team, said. “As you await a response, please remember this could have been avoided if the Democrats voted for the clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government open.” (The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to us later, saying that “Democrats have chosen to shut down the government” and echoing the political attacks Trump has made core to his messaging.)
Some Democrats have said that Trump’s actions have only increased their resolve to ensure that he is not rewarded for what they see as bullying behavior. “Time to stiffen our spines and demand that we only fund a government that obeys the law,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, wrote on X yesterday. But at least some Democrats have broken ranks, with three senators voting on Tuesday in favor of the continuing resolution that would fund the government for seven weeks without making the changes to health-care law that their party has sought.
Not all Republicans support what Trump and Vought are doing by freezing congressionally approved funding in Democratic districts. Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, a Republican, told Semafor that Vought is “less politically in tune than the president” and that “being aggressive with executive power in this moment” carries political risks. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told HuffPost that the Trump administration’s power moves could “create a toxic environment here,” jeopardizing any possibility of a deal to end the shutdown.
Democrats, for their part, remember that Trump took the brunt of the blame for the three shutdowns during his first term. Several pointed to a Washington Post poll released today that indicates that more people blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats. Many Democrats think that those numbers will only get worse for the president, particularly if his administration goes through with the promise of mass layoffs that he’s been taunting Democrats with. More broadly, many in the party have taken note of Trump’s falling approval ratings—and, they believe, growing authoritarian instincts—and are casting this moment as ripe for a fight that they can win.
The situation suggests a prolonged battle that leaves no participant unscathed, Stier told us. “It seems as if the answer will be that there will be so much pain that eventually one side or the other will determine that they need to withdraw,” he said. “But there will be so much collateral damage from that fight that we’ll all suffer. And that’s just bad for a country.”
Katherine J. Wu and Russell Berman contributed reporting.
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