Tony Romm

Yeah, I think Katie is absolutely right that this is emboldening Democrats to keep fighting, even though they have seen pretty staggering cuts in some cases to their states and districts as the president has weaponized this shutdown.

But I think the reason that's happening is because they have this deeper worry about the ways in which the president has asserted his power to rearrange the budget and to do so in a way that disregards what Congress may say about what he must spend or what he must not spend.

Many of the areas that the president has looked to cut and the layoffs that he has looked to make, particularly during the shutdown, track with the things that he proposed to do as part of his 2026 budget.

He wanted to cut agencies like housing and health and energy and education, which are the very programs that he has targeted during the shutdown with the layoffs that the court has now blocked and with the other sorts of, quote, permanent cuts that he has said he is pursuing and could potentially put out later this week.

I think that this administration is always trying to test that and that this shutdown has just been the latest stage where they're trying to act that out.

And I think the president himself has said this.

I mean, on numerous occasions, he has described the shutdown as a, quote, unprecedented opportunity to make changes to the budget.

Because I think on some level, the White House does see this as a little bit of a win-win.

Like, I don't think that they want the government to be shut down, but I think that they're going to extract the greatest number of benefits that they can out of it while the government is shut down.

And they're going to do that with the help of folks like Russ Vogt, who runs the Office of Management and Budget, and has long preached this idea that the president should have expansive power to set the nation's spending levels and to defy Congress.

So this has just been, at least in the eyes of the president, a great opportunity to push further down this road of taking power over the nation's budget from lawmakers.

What do you say, Tony?

I would just echo exactly what Tyler said specifically on the impacts of the shutdown.

You know, before we all sat down here, I was talking to some state officials who administer the program called Food Stamps.

It's federal nutrition assistance for low-income Americans.

And they told me that because of the shutdown, because of how long it had gone, in some cases they've had to stop accepting applications for new benefits because

And they're worried about being able to pay benefits in the month of November.

That's not something that's shown up in the data, right?

It has not hit Americans' pocketbooks just yet.

But it will.

It'll happen soon.

And I think as you start to see cases like that throughout the economy, on top of the broader hits to the U.S.

economy at a moment where things are pretty fragile, I think that's the kind of thing that might start to get folks in the room.

And actually trying to make a deal against the backdrop of a White House that hasn't always stuck to the deal when it comes to federal spending.

Right, absolutely.

This is not just rhetorical.

This is an attempt to inflict real pain on the president's political enemies, in this case, Democrats.

And they have done this on a number of fronts.

They have taken steps to halt or cancel billions of dollars that the federal government had previously approved for cities and states and congressional districts led by Democratic leaders.

They have taken steps to fire thousands of federal workers who serve at agencies that the president, at least, believes to be, quote, Democrat agencies or on Democrat programs.

Yeah, it's a great question.

And I think the president has used this phrase, Democrat agencies or Democrat programs, as shorthand to describe kind of two different things.

The first is agencies and programs that largely track the areas that Democrats increased when President Joe Biden was in power, things like health and education and housing and research.

But I think second, more broadly, this White House sees the function of government as inherently democratic.

And they see the cuts to the work of government as bringing government more in line with their vision that, you know, Washington and the bureaucracy should have less of a role in people's lives and in the management of the economy.

Well, I think the best way to answer that question is maybe.

You know, as a general rule, Congress writes laws.

It tells the president how to spend money, and the president has to spend money on those things that Congress told him to spend the money on.

There's a provision in law that allows the president to move some money around at the Department of Defense, but the amount is capped and the use of that money is restricted.

can't just grab a bucket of money from the Department of Homeland Security and use that to, you know, pay for something at the Department of Energy.

And so that's what's made the president's actions so remarkable and in some ways unorthodox here, because he has pushed the limits of his ability to reprogram parts of the budget without Congress.

And privately, though, when you talk to some of these folks on the Hill and elsewhere, they will tell you that they are super concerned because even though they like paying the troops, they have this concern about this ends justify the means argument that the administration is sometimes making with the budget.

Because for, you know, right now, it's okay that he's using money for a purpose that both parties would like to see him spend it on with the troops.

But nothing is to say that the president will continue to push that envelope in ways that would see him use the money for more controversial purposes, perhaps in defiance of what Congress has said.

Got it.

Yeah, with a few exceptions, most of the government remains shut down.

And so as a result of that, there are hundreds of thousands of civilian employees at agencies that touch on functions like housing and health and education who are furloughed right now.

They're out of work, they're not receiving pay, and the administration has not taken any steps to reprogram the budget in a way for these individuals to be paid.

In fact, the president and his aides at times have suggested that some of these hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers may not even be automatically entitled to back pay once the shutdown ends.

Potentially.

I mean, there is a law that, in fact, President Trump himself signed at the end of the longest shutdown in U.S.

history that—

guaranteed so far, right, that guaranteed these individuals back pay.

But the White House has tried to interpret that law in a way that may suggest that they won't provide that automatic back pay.

So there are hundreds of thousands of people who really do have their finances at risk here.

And that's on top of those that the White House has now said it's potentially looking to fire.

Because President Trump and his aides have made very clear that in their attempts to weaponize this shutdown, they also want to conduct another round of mass layoffs.

And they began to take the steps to do that last week when they announced an initial batch of about 4,000 federal workers across eight major agencies that they were going to cut from government in a process that will take about 60 days.

That has been the subject of litigation.

A federal judge recently blocked the administration from proceeding with those layoffs, but the president and his aides have made clear that they're not backing down and they really do want to cut government.

And so if those people are in fact laid off, that's just another financial blow on top of what they're already experiencing.