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Heather Cox Richardson on the abdication of responsibility by republicans and control by the unelected
Letters from an American - October 7, 2025
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-7-2025
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today floated the idea that workers furloughed during a government shutdown are not guaranteed back pay when the shutdown is resolved. Marc Caputo of Axios broke the story of the new OMB memo this morning. Caputo pointed out that in 2019, during the last government shutdown, President Donald Trump signed a law designed to make it clear that furloughed workers would get paid. Caputo notes that the OMB’s new reading of the law is “a major departure from the administration’s own guidance issued…last month.”
. . .
Of the threat to withhold back pay for furloughed employees, a senior White House official told Caputo: “OMB is in charge.”
The power being wielded by unelected officials in the Trump administration echoes the conditions of the U.S. government a century ago. In 1920, Republicans won a landslide victory. They put the handsome, back-slapping Warren G. Harding in the White House in what was widely interpreted as the country’s desire to leave the years of World War I behind them and to stop having to listen to President Woodrow Wilson’s preaching at them (one journalist called Wilson a “frozen flame of righteous intelligence”). Old-school Republicans who rejected the party’s early-twentieth-century progressivism won control of Congress.
But the victory offered no clear direction for the country. Party leaders had put Harding at the head of the ticket because he was from Ohio, whose loss in 1916 had cost the Republicans the presidency. Harding celebrated his anti-intellectualism and the fact that, even after a world war, he knew nothing about Europe. He told one of his secretaries he couldn’t make heads or tails of fights over taxes, and he was such a terrible speaker that one man commented that his speeches “leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes those meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”
Harding could not manage his corrupt appointees, who became known as the “Ohio Gang,” and spent much of his time drinking and playing poker upstairs at the White House. In the absence of a strong president, the power of the government could have flowed to Congress. But congressional Republicans had spent twenty years obstructing the progressive presidents who had been in the White House since 1901: first Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and then Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Republicans in Congress had become skilled at obstruction, but once in power, they split into factions and quarreled among themselves.
Into the vacuum stepped administration officers, notably Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. With them at the helm, the government implemented pro-business policies that would turn the government over to businessmen. Eight years later, the conflagration of the Great Crash and the ensuing Great Depression illustrated just how misguided the abdication of elected lawmakers from their duties had been.
. . .
. . .
Of the threat to withhold back pay for furloughed employees, a senior White House official told Caputo: “OMB is in charge.”
The power being wielded by unelected officials in the Trump administration echoes the conditions of the U.S. government a century ago. In 1920, Republicans won a landslide victory. They put the handsome, back-slapping Warren G. Harding in the White House in what was widely interpreted as the country’s desire to leave the years of World War I behind them and to stop having to listen to President Woodrow Wilson’s preaching at them (one journalist called Wilson a “frozen flame of righteous intelligence”). Old-school Republicans who rejected the party’s early-twentieth-century progressivism won control of Congress.
But the victory offered no clear direction for the country. Party leaders had put Harding at the head of the ticket because he was from Ohio, whose loss in 1916 had cost the Republicans the presidency. Harding celebrated his anti-intellectualism and the fact that, even after a world war, he knew nothing about Europe. He told one of his secretaries he couldn’t make heads or tails of fights over taxes, and he was such a terrible speaker that one man commented that his speeches “leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes those meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”
Harding could not manage his corrupt appointees, who became known as the “Ohio Gang,” and spent much of his time drinking and playing poker upstairs at the White House. In the absence of a strong president, the power of the government could have flowed to Congress. But congressional Republicans had spent twenty years obstructing the progressive presidents who had been in the White House since 1901: first Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and then Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Republicans in Congress had become skilled at obstruction, but once in power, they split into factions and quarreled among themselves.
Into the vacuum stepped administration officers, notably Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. With them at the helm, the government implemented pro-business policies that would turn the government over to businessmen. Eight years later, the conflagration of the Great Crash and the ensuing Great Depression illustrated just how misguided the abdication of elected lawmakers from their duties had been.
. . .