This may well be the end of federal government as we know it today, worse than even this sorry state [View all]
...when it opens, or if it opens again.
White House lays groundwork for mass government firings if there's a shutdown.
The Office of Management and Budget says in a memo that agencies should prepare reduction-in-force plans to accompany furloughs if a spending bill isn't passed next week.
"With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out," the memo says. "RIF notices will be in addition to any furlough notices provided due to the lapse in appropriation."
"Programs that did not benefit from an infusion of mandatory appropriations will bear the brunt of a shutdown, and we must continue our planning efforts in the event Democrats decide to shut down the government," the memo says.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-omb-memo-mass-firings-government-shutdown-congress-rcna233590
Trump could use a shutdown to dismantle government functions, wrote Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on improving the federal government.
If lawmakers can’t reach a deal, Stier wrote, Trump and Vought “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.”
Beyond the Antideficiency Act, which says the government cannot spend money or incur debts without Congress’ authority, the shutdown process has historically been guided by traditions, not laws.
In recent past shutdowns, hundreds of thousands of employees were furloughed, but the shutdowns did not result in mass permanent layoffs or significant reorganizations. Under federal law, federal workers also receive back pay for their time on furlough.
Trump and his congressional allies would be in charge of the government amid a shutdown.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-a-government-shutdown-could-give-trump-more-power
___Democrats and Republicans must agree on a temporary spending bill by the end of Tuesday to avoid a government shutdown. And as of Monday morning, a shutdown — of undetermined duration — looks more likely than not. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appear determined to play hardball, as restive Democratic voters demand their leaders take a more aggressive posture against an administration they loathe — and which has steamrolled Congress on spending. Democrats are demanding an extension of Obamacare subsidies in exchange for the Senate votes necessary to meet the 60-vote threshold and keep the government open. (The two Democratic leaders are meeting with their Republican counterparts and President Donald Trump on Monday, slightly raising the odds of a last-minute deal.)
The party demanding concessions usually takes the blame for a shutdown and its attendant downsides. But this time around, there’s another factor for Democrats to keep in mind: the Trump administration’s mission to cripple the administrative state. Russell Vought, the powerful head of the Office of Management and Budget, has threatened to institute mass layoffs in the event of a shutdown, to which Democrats have reacted defiantly. But how realistic is the threat?
Don Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, who is an expert on the federal bureaucracy:
I think this is not a bluff. It’s entirely possible that the Republicans wouldn’t mind at all taking the short-term hit of whatever blowback there may be from a government shutdown in exchange for gaining more power over both the budget and the personnel system. They’ve been campaigning across the board for the power to be able to fire anybody they want to fire, from Federal Reserve Board members to people working in local social-security offices. There is a large group of people on the right, many of whom work inside the administration, who believe that the president has that power — that all federal employees ultimately are at will, and they think they can trace it back to the time of the founding. So they want to try to establish that policy and use this as a precedent, and then combine that with the power of impoundment. So I think they would not be very disappointed if it turns out they can blame the Democrats for having triggered the shutdown, then use that shutdown to be able to expand the president’s power into areas where they’ve wanted to move.
I can’t get inside their heads, and this certainly is not what I would recommend to anybody, but it could work something like this: There’s no money appropriated, there’s no continuing resolution, and there’s a shutdown. So then there’s a question of what actually gets shut down. And OMB, as it turns out, is who decides which employees and which functions are essential and which ones are not. Russell Vought has already said that he’s going to tell everybody that the most essential functions are ones that were in the Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the ones that weren’t are not. So they could say, “We’re really sorry, but you’re gone, because you’re doing a nonessential function and there’s no money to pay you.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/are-democrats-about-to-walk-into-a-government-shutdown-trap.html
A key Trump ally detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the EPA and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.
In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.
He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”
Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-key-ally-russell-vought-agenda_n_671fed62e4b0a55cb4cdec09
= new reply since forum marked as read