Blame, strategising and America’s government shutdown

“THIS IS LIKE a kamikaze attack. They have nothing to lose.” Such was the exasperated way in which Donald Trump described the Democrats’ approach to the government shutdown as it dragged into its second week. Democrats have repeatedly refused to back a short-term funding bill that would reopen the government until Republicans make concessions on funding tax credits that have expanded health-care coverage. Republicans are looking for new ways to cudgel them into caving. One weapon is Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It is hard to know if Mr Trump is just using Mr Vought as a threat, or if Mr Vought is using Mr Trump as an opportunity. It may be both; either way the ideas are worth taking seriously.

Mr Vought has urged the government to use the shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands of federal workers and gut federal programmes. “He’s getting ready to cut things,” the president told reporters on October 7th. “We have a lot of things that we’re going to eliminate.” Democrats have dismissed such threats as bluster, designed to pressure them into voting for a budget. But as the shutdown grinds on some Democrats worry that they may be walking into a trap set by Mr Vought. “Russ was always going to exploit the shutdown,” says a former OMB official who worked with Mr Vought during the president’s first term. “He knows his job is to provide ammunition to the president to get a deal.” So what exactly is in Mr Vought’s arsenal?

The OMB director can use his powers during a shutdown to decide which agencies close and what spending to prioritise. So far Mr Vought has made a show of retaliating against Democrats by going after infrastructure projects in states they govern. That includes freezing $18bn allocated for transit programmes in New York, the home state of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the two top Democrats in Congress. Mr Vought also cancelled $8bn in green energy projects, nearly all of which were located in states that plumped for the Democrats during the last presidential election. So far the administration has frozen at least $28bn in funds earmarked for Democratic cities and states. Democrats have argued that these moves are illegal, given that funding was already appropriated by Congress.

The next rung on Mr Vought’s ladder of escalation is his threat to lay off federal workers (“reductions in force” in federal government speak). He has asked heads of federal departments to file plans to the OMB detailing how they would get rid of employees working on parts of the budget covered by discretionary spending, and which do not align with the president’s priorities. The law is uncertain on this point, but it is not clearly hostile to Mr Vought.

Government workers, traumatised by Elon Musk’s DOGE woodchipper, have lawyered-up: two of the biggest federal labour unions have already filed a lawsuit seeking to block any layoffs during a shutdown. Undeterred, Mr Vought has upped the ante. On October 7th a leaked OMB memo claimed that the 750,000 furloughed federal workers may not be entitled to automatic back pay once the government shutdown ends, unless Congress passes a new law that explicitly funds it.

The strategy of maximum pain alone may not break the impasse. But a precondition for reopening the government is usually that one party concludes it is losing. Polling by YouGov for The Economist suggests, unsurprisingly, that blame for the shutdown breaks along the usual partisan lines. But self-identified independents blame Republicans more, and the longer the shutdown goes on the wider the margin grows on this question.

Some Republicans are uneasy about the threats of mass firings, recalling the unpopularity of DOGE’s swingeing cuts earlier this year back in their home districts. And though Mr Vought has aimed these cuts at Democrats, Republicans in competitive districts in states with Democratic governors are beginning to feel the pain, too. “We don’t control what he’s going to do,” said John Thune, the Republican Senate leader, when asked about Mr Vought’s plans. It did not sound like a battle cry. ■