The White House withheld urgently needed infrastructure funding from a state that didn’t vote for him for president. It unilaterally cut energy grants appropriated by Congress because they don’t meet with the president’s views. It fired workers deemed superfluous. It kept in operation what it likes and took out of operation what it doesn’t like.
All of the above happened before the October 1 government shutdown, and the fact of the shutdown doesn’t change the fundamental illegality of these actions (though what is “legal” with a Supreme Court giving their Special Boy Donald Trump whatever he wants is a difficult metaphysical question). We have hit a phase in the shutdown where Trump and his lieutenant Russ Vought are making decisions they’ve always wanted to make and blaming Democrats for forcing them to make them. You can call it the “look what you made me do” phase of the shutdown.
This is just as unpopular as the original DOGE terror campaign on the federal government, making even Republican members of Congress uncomfortable about their losing the moral high ground during the shutdown. But Democrats aren’t capitalizing the way they should, because they continue to emphasize the wrong remedy for these persistent power grabs.
The first thing Vought did after the shutdown was to withhold $18 billion in infrastructure spending from the New York subway and train tunnel under the Hudson River. This is no different than withholding $4 billion from the high-speed rail project in California back in July, which was also a punishment to a disliked state. We know what was done in New York City was unrelated to the shutdown, because Vought said it directly. The money is being withheld “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” Vought said on X.
This is a tell. Vought has no authority to cancel spending in a shutdown, so he made up a rather ridiculous excuse about diversity hiring to justify punishing New York. In fact, it’s the same DEI excuse made to partially justify canceling high-speed rail funding, before the shutdown. If DOGE 2.0 Commissar Vought wants to DOGE something, he’ll DOGE it, regardless of whether appropriations have lapsed.
Vought’s second action, canceling $8 billion in grants to blue states for climate mitigation projects, similarly was just something he wanted to do anyway. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought posted. Would this Green New Scam funding have been allowed if the budget bill had passed? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled hundreds of climate-related grants, including this recent action to end the Solar for All program.
This is just DOGE 2.0, with the shutdown awkwardly employed as cover.
The energy grant cuts are going to hit red states, too, because taking a hatchet to federal programs is a blunt instrument. But it’s all just more of the same, illegally canceling things Trump and Vought don’t like, whether there’s a shutdown or not. What Vought is doing is pretending that the shutdown gives him some authority to engage in a DOGE rampage—a pretense enabled by the blinkered stories in many media outlets.
That goes also for the so-far threatened mass layoffs, which so far have been only a threat. Vought is literally the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose workforce he has tried repeatedly to reduce by 90 percent. As many people as the courts will allow Vought to fire, he will fire, shutdown or no shutdown.
So far, there are no lists of personnel that will be fired, no paperwork generated to reduce the workforce, as Josh Marshall has reported. Vought keeps claiming the layoffs are coming any day now, and Trump scheduled a meeting with Vought to discuss it. But the point is that, if and when this happens, the layoffs will just be a continuation of the reductions of the federal workforce we’ve seen all year. (The claim from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that layoffs could be “in the thousands” is risible; there have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs already!)
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was a rare Democrat to say this plainly on NPR. “If he fires a bunch of people, it’s not because Democrats wouldn’t reach a deal. It’s because the president decides and actually fires people.” Trump himself stated that Republicans “must use this opportunity,” meaning the shutdown, “to clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud.”
This is just DOGE 2.0, with the shutdown awkwardly employed as cover. It’s like a domestic violence situation where the assailant blames the victim for “making” the beatings happen. And predictably, the public is much smarter than the politicians on this, seeing right through what’s happening, with little help from the media or even most Democratic politicians.
Every poll thus far has shown that the public blames Republicans for the shutdown. And many Republicans in Congress recognize how toxic it is to brutalize the federal workforce and federal programs for no reason. “Russ is less politically in tune than the president,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) to Semafor, worrying that Vought would “squander” the moral high ground of the shutdown by “being aggressive with executive power in this moment.”
For that matter, DOGE 1.0 was massively unpopular, so much so that Trump ushered Elon Musk out of the government; many of the fired employees were hired back. Demonstrably making the country worse and then blaming somebody else for it is not a recipe for political success.
There are cracks in this gambit already. If Trump and Vought were so unconcerned about blame, they wouldn’t have figured out how to keep national parks open with skeleton crews. If they knew the public would blame the Democrats for the shutdown, they would furlough more employees than have been furloughed. Trump and Vought are instead mitigating the public-facing pain, allowing things they like, such as ICE raids and merger approvals, to continue, while canceling funding they don’t like. This was Trump’s prime directive before the shutdown and it’s his prime directive now. It’s unpopular, and this is an attention-grabbing moment for Democrats to call it out.
The problem, of course, is that Democrats largely aren’t calling it out; or at least, that message is competing for attention with a conversation about health care subsidies. The fact that Affordable Care Act premiums could close to double for millions of people is important to highlight. But it’s not really connected to the reason for the shutdown: You cannot make a budget deal with someone who won’t honor it.
That’s the problem that needs to be fixed. The Democratic counteroffer actually includes the mechanisms for that fix, by prohibiting rescissions and impoundments and the ways that Trump and Vought are unilaterally deciding what the government spends. But it’s deeply frustrating that they are carrying that out in private, while only publicly speaking about health care subsidies.
Health care is a separate problem that also needs fixing, and Republican leaders know it’s critical to their political survival next year. That’s why they’re so willing to talk about it and use that promise of talking to try to end the shutdown. Sadly, I think that may work. Three senators who caucus with Democrats defected on Tuesday’s vote to reopen the government; only a handful more are needed. Getting some vague promise of negotiations on health care might do the trick—almost entirely because Democrats made the shutdown about health care.
That will mean these haphazard funding cuts and firings will only continue, because they are manifestly not tied to a shutdown, but to the whims of the emperor-king and his Cardinal Richelieu-like henchman, Russ Vought. The public is ready to hear that making a deal with someone eager to go back on that deal is wrong; they’re waiting for Democrats to tell them.