Republicans have advertised, or perhaps threatened, that they will seize more power if there is a shutdown: Last Wednesday, Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, released a memo in which, according to Politico the office “told agencies to identify programs, projects and activities where discretionary funding will lapse Oct. 1 and no alternative funding source is available.” The memo also revealed that OMB was instructing agencies to begin planning so-called reduction-in-force plans “that would go beyond standard furloughs, permanently eliminating jobs in programs not consistent with President Donald Trump’s priorities in the event of a shutdown.”
Lest you think Vought is making an idle threat, he is not. He is one of the architects of Project 2025. Vought believes that the federal government is “costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt.”
“If I were a Democrat and Russ Vought was in charge of OMB, I would have nightmares about what Russ could do that you couldn’t undo when government reopens,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk show host who’s reportedly known the OMB director for decades, told The Boston Globe’s Tal Kopan. “Russ has waited for this moment his whole life.”
This is the threat Republicans used when government funding was running out earlier in the year, and ultimately Schumer and the Democrats ended up supporting an extension. But a lot has happened since March; the Big Beautiful Bill has expanded ICE to the tune of billions of dollars, and Republicans have continued to DOGE the federal government. And the ruling party’s popularity has been in decline.
If the government shuts down, Vought and Trump “will have enormous latitude to determine which services, programs, and employees can be sidelined, decisions that could go far beyond what has occurred during past shutdowns,” writes Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. This is a real worry; Democrats have a much lower pain threshold than Republicans. Republicans want to shrink the government because it’s part of their larger gestalt, whereas Democrats worry that if thousands of Americans lose access to health care it might be hard for them to get it again.
When I talked to Democrats, it really felt like they wanted a deal and thought maybe they could push the administration into some kind of agreement. Probably all that was squashed last night when Trump posted a vulgar AI-generated deepfake video with mariachi music and Jeffries in a sombrero. Ultimately Democrats are going to have the same problem everyone else does when they’re negotiating with Trump: He’s Trump.
