shutdown

WASHINGTON — It has been four months since Elon Musk, President Trump’s bureaucratic demolition man, abandoned Washington in a flurry of recriminations and chaos.

But the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle much of the federal government never ended. It’s merely under new management: the less colorful but more methodical Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

Vought has become the backroom architect of Trump’s aggressive strategy — slashing the federal workforce, freezing billions in congressionally approved spending in actions his critics often call illegal.

Now Vought has proposed using the current government shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands of bureaucrats permanently instead of merely furloughing them temporarily. If any do return to work, he has suggested that the government need not give them back pay — contrary to a law Trump signed in 2019.

Those threats may prove merely to be pressure tactics as Trump tries to persuade Democrats to accept spending cuts on Medicaid, Obamacare and other programs.

But the shutdown battle is the current phase of a much larger one. Vought’s long-term goals, he says, are to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and “deconstruct the administrative state.”

He’s still only partway done.

“I’d estimate that Vought has implemented maybe 10% or 15% of his program,” said Donald F. Kettl, former dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland. “There may be as much as 90% to go. If this were a baseball game, we’d be in the top of the second inning.”

Along the way, Vought (pronounced “vote”) has chipped relentlessly at Congress’ ability to control the use of federal funds, massively expanding the power of the president.

“He has waged the most serious attack on separation of powers in American history,” said Elaine Kamarck, an expert on federal management at the Brookings Institution.

He’s done that mainly by using OMB, the White House office that oversees spending, to control the day-to-day purse strings of federal agencies — and deliberately keeping Congress in the dark along the way.

“If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively,” Vought said last month.

Federal judges have ruled some of the administration’s actions illegal, but they have allowed others to stand. Vought’s proposal to use the shutdown to fire thousands of bureaucrats hasn’t been tested in court.

Vought developed his aggressive approach during two decades as a conservative budget expert, culminating in his appointment as director of OMB in Trump’s first term.

In 2019, he stretched the limits of presidential power by helping Trump get around a congressional ban on funding for a border wall, by declaring an emergency and transferring military funds. He froze congressionally mandated aid for Ukraine, the action that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even so, Vought complained that Trump had been needlessly restrained by cautious first-term aides.

“The lawyers come in and say, ‘It’s not legal. You can’t do that,’” he said in 2023. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office over whether something is legal.”

Vought is a proponent of the “unitary executive” theory, the argument that the president should have unfettered control over every tentacle of the executive branch, including independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve.

When Congress designates money for federal programs, he has argued, “It’s a ceiling. It is not a floor. It’s not the notion that you have to spend every dollar.”

Most legal experts disagree; a 1974 law prohibits the president from unilaterally withholding money Congress has appropriated.

Vought told conservative activists in 2023 that if Trump returned to power, he would deliberately seek to inflict “trauma” on federal employees.

“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.”

When Vought returned to OMB for Trump’s second term, he appeared to be in Musk’s shadow. But once the flamboyant Tesla chief executive flamed out, the OMB director got to work to make DOGE’s work the foundation for lasting changes.

He extended many of DOGE’s funding cuts by slowing down OMB’s approval of disbursements — turning them into de facto freezes.

He helped persuade Republicans in Congress to cancel $9 billion in previously approved foreign aid and public broadcasting support, a process known as “rescission.”

To cancel an additional $4.9 billion, he revived a rarely used gambit called a “pocket rescission,” freezing the funds until they expired.

Along the way, he quietly stopped providing Congress with information on spending, leaving legislators in the dark on whether programs were being axed.

DOGE and OMB eliminated jobs so quickly that the federal government stopped publishing its ongoing tally of federal employees. (Any number would only be approximate; some layoffs are tied up in court, and thousands of employees who opted for voluntary retirement are technically still on the payroll.)

The result was a significant erosion of Congress’ “power of the purse,” which has historically included not only approving money but also monitoring how it was spent.

Even some Republican members of Congress seethed. “They would like a blank check … and I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate, pleased to see spending cut by any means, let Vought have his way. Even McConnell voted to approve the $9-billion rescission request.

Vought’s newest innovation, the mid-shutdown layoffs, would be another big step toward reducing Congress’ role.

“The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers,” Kettl said. “The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress.”

Some of the consequences could be catastrophic, Kettl and other scholars warned. Kamarck calls them “time bombs.”

“One or more of these decisions is going to blow up in Trump’s face,” she said.

“FEMA won’t be capable of reacting to the next hurricane. The National Weather Service won’t have the forecasters it needs to analyze the data from weather balloons.”

Even before the government shutdown, she noted, the FAA was grappling with a shortage of air traffic controllers. This week the FAA slowed takeoffs at several airports in response to growing shortages, including at air traffic control centers in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In theory, a future Congress could undo many of Vought’s actions, especially if Democrats win control of the House or, less likely, the Senate.

But rebuilding agencies that have been radically shrunken would take much longer than cutting them down, the scholars said.

“Much of this will be difficult to reverse when Democrats come back into fashion,” Kamarck said.

Indeed, that’s part of Vought’s plan.

“We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said in April in a podcast with Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was slain on Sept. 10.

He’s pleased with the progress he’s made, he told reporters in July.

“We’re having fun,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Sidelined by political appointees, targeted over deep state conspiracies and derided by the president, career public servants have grown used to life in Washington under a constant state of assault.

But President Trump’s latest threat, to withhold back pay due to workers furloughed by an ongoing government shutdown, is adding fresh uncertainty to the beleaguered workforce.

Whether federal workers will ultimately receive retroactive paychecks after the government reopens, Trump told reporters on Tuesday, “really depends on who you’re talking about.” The law requires federal employees receive their expected compensation in the event of a shutdown.

“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people,” the president said, while adding: “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

It is yet another peril facing public servants, who, according to Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, Russ Vought, may also be the target of mass layoffs if the shutdown continues.

The government has been shut since Oct. 1, when Republican and Democratic lawmakers came to an impasse over whether to extend government funding at existing levels, or account for a significant increase in healthcare premiums facing millions of Americans at the start of next year.

White House officials say that, on the one hand, Democrats are to blame for extending a shutdown that will give the administration no other choice but to initiate firings of agency employees working on “nonessential” projects. On the other hand, the president has referred to the moment as an opportunity to root out Democrats working in career roles throughout the federal system.

Legal scholars and public policy experts have roundly dismissed Trump’s latest efforts — both to use the shutdown as a predicate to cut the workforce, and to withhold back pay — as plainly illegal.

And Democrats in Congress, who continue to vote against reopening the government, are counting on them being right, hoping that courts will reject the administration’s moves while they attempt to secure an extension of healthcare tax credits in the shutdown negotiations.

If the experts are wrong, thousands of government workers could face a profound cost.

“Senior leaders of the Trump administration promised to put federal employees in trauma, and they certainly seem intent on keeping that promise,” said Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.

“According to a law that Trump himself has signed, furloughed employees are entitled to back pay,” Moynihan said. “There is no real ambiguity about this, and the idea only some employees in agencies that Trump likes would receive back pay is an illegal abuse of presidential power.”

A day after the shutdown began, Trump wrote on social media that he planned on meeting with Vought, “of Project 2025 fame,” to discuss what he called the “unprecedented opportunity” of making “permanent” cuts to agencies during the ongoing funding lapse.

A lawsuit brought in California against Vought and the OMB, by a coalition of labor unions representing over 2 million federal workers, is challenging the premise of that claim, arguing the government is “deviating from historic practice and violating applicable laws” by using government employees “as a pawn in congressional deliberations.” But whether courts can or will stop the effort is unclear.

Sen. John Thune, the majority leader and a Republican from South Dakota, said last week that Democrats should have known the risk they were running by “shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought.”

“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” he told Politico.

The White House has sent mixed messages on its willingness to negotiate with Democrats since the shutdown began. Within a matter of hours earlier this week, the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that there was nothing to negotiate, before Trump said that dialogue had opened with Democratic leadership over a potential agreement on healthcare.

Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, taught and trained prospective public servants for 45 years.

“What is happening is profoundly discouraging for young students seeking careers in the federal public service,” he said. “Many of the students are going to state and local governments, nonprofits, and think tanks, but increasingly don’t see the federal government as a place where they can make a difference or make a career.”

“All of us depend on the government, and the government depends on a pipeline of skilled workers,” Kettl added. “The administration’s efforts have blown up the pipeline, and the costs will continue for years — probably decades — to come.”