NEW YORK (AP) — President Trump nominated Stuart Levenbach as the next director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Wednesday, using a legal maneuver to keep his budget director Russell Vought as acting director of the bureau while the Trump administration continues on its plan to shut down the consumer financial protection agency.
Levenbach is currently an associate director inside the Office of Management and Budget, handling issues related to natural resources, energy, science and water issues. Levenbach’s resume shows significant experience dealing with science and natural resources issues, acting as chief of staff of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump’s first term.
Levenbach’s nomination is not meant to go through to confirmation, an administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. Under the Vacancies Act, Vought can only act as acting director for 210 days, but now that Trump has nominated someone to the position, that clock has been suspended until the Senate approves or denies Levenbach’s confirmation as director. Vought is Levenbach’s boss.
The CFPB has been nonfunctional much of the year. Many of its employees have been ordered not to work, and the only major work the bureau is doing is unwinding the regulations and rules it put into place during Trump’s first term and during the Biden administration.
While in the acting director role, Vought has signaled that he wishes to dismantle, or vastly diminish, the bureau.
The latest blow to the bureau’s future came earlier this month, when the White House said it does not plan to withdraw any funds from the Federal Reserve, which is where the bureau gets its funding, to fund the bureau past Dec. 31.
The White House and the Justice Department are using a legal interpretation of the law that created the bureau, the Dodd-Frank Act, that the Fed must be profitable in order to fund the CFPB’s operations. Since roughly 2022, the Fed has been cash-flow negative since it owns bonds from the COVID-19 pandemic that pay very low interest but must pay out higher interest to the banks that deposit reserves with it. This means, on paper, the Fed is not earning a profit at the moment and therefore has no money to allot to the CFPB.
Several judges have rejected this argument when it was brought up by companies, but it’s never been the position of the government until this year that the CFPB requires the Fed to be profitable to provided the CFPB with operating funds.
“Donald Trump’s sending the Senate a new nominee to lead the CFPB looks like nothing more than a front for Russ Vought to stay on as Acting Director indefinitely as he tries to illegally close down the agency,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, in a statement.
The bureau was created after the 2008 financial crisis as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, a law passed to overhaul the financial system and require banks to hold more capital to avoid another financial crisis. The CFPB was created to be a independent advocate for consumers to help them avoid bad actors in the financial system.
(CNN) — Hundreds of staff fired from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late Friday have been reinstated, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.
After a new round of layoff notices sent late Friday night to around 1,300 workers at the CDC, approximately 700 were reinstated on Saturday, while about 600 remain laid off, according to the union, which represents federal workers.
“The employees who received incorrect notifications were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” said Andrew Nixon, director of communications for the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Among reinstated employees are staff that publish the agency’s flagship journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to Dr. Debra Houry, who recently resigned as the agency’s chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science. Houry and other high-level CDC officials resigned in August in protest over the firing of recently confirmed CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez.
Athalia Christie, the incident commander for the measles response, was among hundreds of employees mistakenly fired on Friday. The annual total of measles cases in the US – now up to 1,563 cases since January – is the highest by a significant margin since measles was declared eliminated in America a quarter-century ago.
Staff were also reinstated at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the Global Health Center, and the Public Health Infrastructure Center, which manages more than $3 billion in grants to 107 state and local governments to help build local public health workforces, said Dr. Brian Castrucci, who is president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for public health workers.
Staff and officers at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service who were able to check their emails have also received notices that their firings were in error, according to a CDC official with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.
Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, also known as “disease detectives,” are often the first to respond to disease threats when they arise.
“We think all staff and all officers” are back, the official said.
The mistakenly fired employees were sent incorrect notifications because of a coding error on the notices, according to an HHS official. The employees who got the miscoded notifications were all told about the glitch on Friday or Saturday, the person said.
“It’s pure managerial incompetence,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, who resigned earlier this year as principal deputy director of the CDC. “I used to think that chaos was the byproduct of this managerial incompetence. Now I start to wonder whether the chaos is the point.”
Staff at CDC’s Washington office, in its Violence Prevention programs, and in the Office of the Director of the Injury Center, remain separated from the agency as part of the latest round of the Trump administration’s Reduction in Force initiatives. In total, the cuts total about 600 positions.
The impact of these job losses may not be immediately apparent to people going about their day-to-day lives, but they leave the country less prepared, said Shah, who is currently a visiting professor at Colby College in Maine.
“These cuts will mean that when the next health crisis comes along, precious days, weeks, months will be spent getting ready when we should have been ready,” Shah said.
President Donald Trump said late Friday afternoon that he planned to fire “a lot” of federal workers in retaliation for the government shutdown, vowing to target those deemed to be aligned with the Democratic Party.
“We figure they started this thing, so they should be Democrat-oriented,” Trump said, placing blame for the shutdown on Democratic lawmakers. Trump did not provide details on what qualified the affected workers as “Democrat-oriented.”
The legality of firing federal workers during a government shutdown is also in question. Shortly after Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought posted “The RIFs have begun” on X on Friday AFGE replied “The lawsuit has been filed.”
A court filing in that case indicates more than 4,100 federal workers were impacted by the cuts at HHS as well as the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury.
“My message for the CDC staff is the work they do has never been more important,” Shah said.
Here’s the real battleground. Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
As congressional Democrats sort through their strategic options for managing the current government shutdown, they should keep in mind the unavailability of some prize they might otherwise seek and the variable rewards associated with others. In the real world, Donald Trump isn’t going to reverse the Medicaid cuts enacted in the Republican megabill or permanently eschew Russ Vought’s claims of executive-branch power over spending authority. Now that he’s hailed Vought as the Grim Reaper and labeled Democrats as “the party of Satan,” about the most the opposition can realistically expect is a suspension of mass federal-employee layoffs if the government reopens, and even that’s a stretch. Yes, the most realizable goal is some sort of extension (probably partial) of Obamacare premium subsidies, and that’s a pretty big deal. But that would mean giving up a portion of the Democratic case that Trump is ravaging health-care coverage, so the prize would be shared.
The limited public concessions Democrats can claim have led some observers to suggest they focus on issues that the public may not perceive as vital but that really would restrict Trump’s ability to act like a dictator while providing relief to his victims. Jonathan V. Last suggests a few at the Bulwark:
Ending qualified immunity for federal law enforcement officers.
Mandating that federal law enforcement officers cannot wear masks and must display identifying badges/markings at all times.
Closing the “emergency” loopholes that the administration has claimed for everything from tariffs to acts of war.
Removing the secretary of state’s discretionary power to revoke visas.
If, as is entirely possible, it’s exactly these sort of obscure but crucial legal and institutional issues where the White House will be most obstinate, then different calculations might come into play. Ultimately, if Congress or the courts won’t do their part to restrain Trump’s power grabs, the only recourse is a decision by voters to take away his governing trifecta in November 2026, most likely by flipping the House to Democratic control.
Democrats understand that unique opportunity, which is why they are putting so much emphasis on health-care policy, an area of historic weakness for Republicans and a particular vulnerability for Trump. In focusing their demands for reopening the government on health care, they are in effect rehearsing their midterm message. But there is perhaps one other thing they can do to boost their chances of winning in 2026 that could become a key demand in negotiations to end the shutdown: limiting the administration’s assault on the election system. It’s far too late for Democrats to do much (other than retaliate, as California is doing) about Trump’s unprecedented campaign to convince red states to redraw their congressional maps to shake loose a few more Republican-leaning districts, reducing the number of seats they’d need in order to hang onto the House. But there are other election-rigging measures they should try to prevent.
Specifically, Democrats could demand a hold on any steps to implement Trump’s dangerous and probably unconstitutional executive order of March 26, which aimed at instituting a national voter-ID system, restricting or even banning voting by mail, and getting rid of voting machines. As election-law wizard Rick Hasen noted immediately: “The aim here is voter suppression pure and simple.” Because of the legal obstacles Trump’s “reforms” face, and since the administration hasn’t done much to put them in place, quietly shelving them might be doable, and would prevent a lot of havoc next year. While they are at it, Democrats should definitely secure a personal pledge from Speaker Mike Johnson that he will not refuse to seat Democratic House candidates whose elections are state-certified on specious grounds that “voter fraud” occurred or that the results are too close to implement. This is the 2027 version of the attempted 2021 Trump election coup I fear most.
The bigger point here is that all the great messaging and tactical victories Democrats can devise won’t amount to a hill of beans if Trump once again denies the adverse result of an election and this time manages to hang onto total power. Nothing matters more than keeping that from happening.
Russ Vought’s coming for you! Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
There are a lot of developments that can be cited to illuminate the crucial differences between the first and second Trump administrations, ranging from the simple idea that “practice makes perfect” to the observation that the president has carefully ensured no one around him will exercise a restraining influence over his darker impulses. But the government shutdown has brought to light one very specific change that is especially ominous, as Toluse Olorunnipa and Jonathan Lemire explain at The Atlantic:
Thirty-four days into the previous government shutdown, in 2019, reporters asked President Donald Trump if he had a message for the thousands of federal employees who were about to miss another paycheck. “I love them. I respect them. I really appreciate the great job they’re doing,” he said at the time. The following day, caving after weeks of punishing cable-news coverage, he signed legislation to reopen the government, lauding furloughed employees as “incredible patriots,” pledging to quickly restore their back pay, and calling the moment “an opportunity for all parties to work together for the benefit of our whole beautiful, wonderful nation.”
Doesn’t really sound like the same guy, does it?
It sure doesn’t. Trump has greeted the 2025 shutdown as a heaven-sent opportunity to fire hundreds of thousands of employees at what he calls “Democrat Agencies” at the behest of his budget director, Russell Vought, the government-hating religious zealot whose nihilistic suggestions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 were considered so politically radioactive that Trump claimed to know nothing about the initiative. Now he’s posting AI video of Vought as the Grim Reaper come to life to get rid of bureaucrats who aren’t engaged in the holy MAGA trinity of killing, jailing, or deporting people.
Yes, the president loves trolling people, and Vought swears by the value of “traumatizing” the denizens of the “deep state” who resist or simply get in the way of the administration’s agenda. But this is by no means an isolated incident of the vastly expanded list of Americans Trump now considers his current enemies and future victims. If you want to understand the most crucial difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, look to the targets of his wrath.
Coming out of the 2024 election, there were many justifiable fears that Trump would act on his frequent threats of vengeance against highly placed “enemies” ranging from Republican “traitors” such as Liz Cheney, to the federal prosecutors who tried and failed to hold him accountable, to “fake news” media executives, to conspiracy-theory suspects like vaccine scientists. Likely targets included whole institutions thought to have betrayed him (like the FBI) and “radical left” policies like DEI and climate change that were campaign-trail hobgoblins.
True to his malicious word, Trump has urged prosecutors and investigators and his social-media bullies to “go after” all these prominent symbols of the hated opposition. But now the ranks of “enemies of the people” has expanded far beyond the liberal elites and Never Trumpers who were objects of so much presidential ire in the past. Enemies now include whole categories of Americans deemed guilty by association with institutions and causes deemed inimical to the mission of “saving America.” Trump has signaled that entire cities will become “training grounds” for the U.S. military, denied self-governance and basic civil liberties because of their inherently perfidious nature as “the enemy within.” Major sectors of civil society, most obviously higher education, have been declared presumptively hostile and subject to shakedowns and forced takeovers. Anyone voicing opposition to the administration’s mass-deportation program is being treated as consciously treasonous and the ally of “invaders.” And most recently, in the wake of the assassination of MAGA and Christian-nationalist icon Charlie Kirk, the president, the vice-president, the top White House policy adviser, and the attorney general have all suggested that any strongly worded criticism of the administration might be treated as illegal incitement to violence or “terrorism.”
Looking at all these phenomena, it should be clear that we are witnessing not just a rhetorical escalation of MAGA attacks on Trump enemies now that a supine Republican Party controls the federal government. The battleground is widening dramatically even as Trump wins more and more turf. Perhaps the president’s threats to lay waste to his own executive branch reflect a hitherto-unknown fidelity to old-school small-government conservatism of the sort that Vought and his friends in the House Freedom Caucus have fused with MAGA culture-war preoccupations into a radical ideology of maximum destruction. But more likely he understands that he has just three years left to consummate his lifelong war against those who opposed or underestimated him, and wants to leave as high a body count as possible. The “enemy within” could grow to encompass half the nation.
President Trump has shared a largely AI generated music video which depicts Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, one of the architects of the conservative Project 2025 plan, as the grim reaper on his Truth Social website.
In the video the reaper is portrayed walking through Washington D.C., before its identity is revealed as Vought. Meanwhile, a band is formed by AI generated versions of President Trump, Vice-President J.D. Vance and a number of skeletons. The music is a cover of the 1976 Blue Oyster Cult’s hit “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”
Trump shared the clip on Thursday after saying he would meet with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” amid the ongoing partial government shutdown.
Vought was one of the architects of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation organized agenda for a Republican president published ahead of the 2024 presidential election. During the election campaign Trump distanced himself from the project commenting: “I know nothing about Project 2025.”
The video was credited to the ‘Dilley 300 Meme Team,’ which produces pro-Trump content for social media.
Russell Vought is probably looking forward to Wednesday. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
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? For clarity on that question and the Trump administration’s efforts to lay waste to government in general, I spoke with 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.
There was almost a government shutdown back in March. One of the reasons Democrats gave for not going down that path was that the Trump administration could have used such a shutdown to wreak even more chaos on the federal government. This time, Democrats are, as of now, barreling forward and basically saying “Screw you. This is a bluff.” To what extent do you think they’re playing with fire? 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 thepower 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.
What is it about a shutdown that enables them to do so much more than they are already doing in terms of layoffs? 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.”
And I imagine it will be a challenge to get that overturned, since the Supreme Court has been very much on Trump’s side with this sort of thing. That’s true, but even before you get there, it would be hard for the most liberal justices to argue that OMB needs to be punished because it’s committing to spending money that Congress hasn’t yet appropriated. It would really put the Supreme Court in the middle of a separation-of-powers question of Article One versus Article Two, where it doesn’t really have a role. What’s the court going to do? Say you have to spend money that Congress hasn’t appropriated?
There is a looming Supreme Court case about those very issues: separation of powers and impoundment. The Trump administration is trying to claw back foreign-aid money for AIDS patients that Congress already appropriated. On Friday, the Supreme Court gave permission for the Trump administration to withhold that money for now, but the case itself won’t be resolved for a long time. Is that the only thing holding the Trump administration back from pretty much controlling the power of the federal purse? They don’t have a single thrust against impoundment that they’re using — it’s that they are working on multiple fronts. So the question, at this point, is whether or not they are cleverly trying to trigger a shutdown so they can even more fully expand their power, beyond what I think perhaps maybe even they imagined at the beginning. And that, I think, is a very real possibility.
To step back a bit on the Trump administration’s plans: When we first spoke last December, we were talking about Schedule F, the job classification the Trump administration used to try to fire federal workers at the end of his first term. It seemed like that would be the mechanism they’d use against the federal workforce in the second term. But they went a different way, right? I tell people I’m the biggest sucker that ever lived because I spent four years telling everybody you better watch out for Schedule F. It was going to be a way to try to remake the workforce in the image and likeness of Trumpism. And they just completely suckered me in, because that turned out to be a nothingburger by comparison to everything else.
How so? Schedule F was dropped almost at the very end of the first Trump administration. The idea was to allow the administration to take anybody who was in a policymaking or policy-influencing position in government and put them into a new schedule of the federal workforce, which would remove their civil-service protections and make it possible to dismiss them at will. And that involved how many people? Well, we never got a chance to find out.
The administration comes in this time and says that essentially there was so much flak around Schedule F that we’re now going to call it “Schedule Policy/Career.” Somehow they didn’t check the acronym and ended up with “Schedule PC.” This is an administration that’s really good at messaging, and that’s a message that they didn’t get quite right. But with Schedule PC, it’s essentially the same thing: It allows them to ultimately dismiss anybody in a policy position. But with Schedule PC, you’ve got to work with people who were already there and move them into a Schedule PC from which they can potentially be dismissed.
Now they’ve rolled out Schedule G, where you can appoint somebody from scratch whose only qualification is the willingness of the president to appoint them — that is, loyalty — and then have the person be dismissed at any point, at any time for any reason. So it creates a potentially unlimited number of political appointees who were intended to last through the administration and then be dismissible at the end. For the defenders of Schedule F at the end of the last administration who said “you have to understand, this is not an effort to try to reassert the spoils system — well, schedule PC might not have been, but Schedule G sure is. And what it is a way to essentially appoint as many people as you want into these positions without regard to any qualification except loyalty and to dismiss them at will.
What we don’t know is how many people were put in Schedule PC and how many people were appointed in Schedule G. We don’t know how many people have been dismissed, how many people were RIFed, how many people took the buyout. We just don’t know anything really about any of that stuff at this point. The administration has let a few numbers out, but we have no idea what the overall piece looks like. So we’ve got this advantage of operating behind a smokescreen.
They’ve been very clever in their approach to all of this. Yeah. They have developed and used techniques and tools that I don’t think I had seen even discussed or breathed of up to this point.
And yet there’s still a large percentage of federal workers still in place. It’s not like the Trump administration has come close to replacing every single person in the workforce and made them pledge loyalty to Trump, right? No, they certainly haven’t fired everybody and they haven’t tried to, but they have terrified everybody for sure. And that, I think, is something that is at least as important to them, as a way to try to bring employees to heel. At this point, nobody really knows for sure how stable their job might be. So they’ve succeeded through a whole collection of strategies and tactics to do more, both to clean house where they wanted to clean house up to a point, and then to put everybody on notice. Because at this point, it’s hard to know what it might be that would stop them.
In our last conversation, you said that when it came to dismantling the federal bureaucracy, it was going to be a fight between the Elon Musk way of doing things and the Russell Vought way of doing things. DOGE is still operating in some form, but Musk flamed out of government. So now we’re certainly firmly in the Vought era, and it’s probably not going away anytime soon, right? You never say anything is forever with Trump, but he is one of the truly indispensable people in the administration because he has a big, large ring of keys that open up any door where the administration would want to go. And it’s impossible to overstate how invaluable that is. You just can’t get anything done. If you want to do a shutdown, if you want to figure out what legal authorities you can use to be able to do that, if you want to know which line or which appropriations covers what, it takes a long time to accumulate that kind of knowledge. He’s got it. And there’s nobody else in the foreground who does.
Would they do DOGE again if they had a chance? I think the answer is mixed. On the one hand, I think just about everybody would say that DOGE done as it was was a mistake in so many ways. But on the other hand, it had two advantages. One is that it threw so much into the air that it provided an opportunity through the chaos, and we know one of Trump’s favorite political strategies is generating chaos so that he can just then find the way through that he finds the most useful. The other is that Vought comes on looking like a staid, button-down firebrand by comparison. So it allows him a lot more room to do what he’s doing in ways he might have had a hard time with if it weren’t for DOGE.
Let’s say the Trump administration ends up losing the impoundment case at the Supreme Court — which it seems to have a good chance of winning — or the big Lisa Cook Federal Reserve case, or some of the other cases working their way through the courts. How much could any of that slow them down? You can drive down the highway at 90 miles an hour and maybe one or two parts of the car fall off, but you can keep the rest of the car going. And you can lose a fair number of these cases and still create enough forward momentum to be able to keep things going. They’re really in a powerful, powerful position because the administration is taking big, bold steps and the courts, by their very nature, take small, relatively incremental steps. So the administration’s always going to outrun the courts.
Yeah, that’s been a dynamic from day one of this administration. By the time courts even consider what the administration has done, it’s too late to stop a lot of it. Exactly. Or even if they stop one piece of it, the other 90 percent of what was wrapped around it is continuing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the reasons congressional Democrats are unwilling to accept a “clean” stopgap spending bill that would avert a government shutdown until November 21 is the pattern of lawless power grabs by the Trump administration, and particularly by OMB director and Project 2025 co-architect Russell Vought. Indeed, the Democratic counterproposal to the GOP’s “clean” continuing resolution includes a demand that spending clawbacks by Vought be reversed and forsworn. But as the two parties drift toward a government shutdown in five days, with no negotiations in sight, Vought has now thumbed his nose at the Democrats, all precedents, and congressional authority over the federal government by announcing that agencies disfavored by the administration will have massive “reductions in force” if funding runs out on September 30. These RIFs would have the effect of turning the temporary furloughs of “nonessential” federal employees that typically accompany a shutdown into permanent layoffs, with the precise targets and levels of firings dependent on OMB’s judgment about what’s necessary to promote the “president’s priorities.”
This legally shaky directive builds on earlier OMB instructions to federal agencies to prepare RIF plans to terminate as many as 30 percent of their employees, and in some cases, on DOGE assessments of unnecessary programs and personnel. For the most part, the RIFs haven’t materialized, and in some cases, agencies have even hired back employees chased off by the kiddie software warriors of DOGE, which has itself largely given way to Trump-appointed agency heads and OMB. These zombie slash-and-burn efforts are now roaring back to life.
The RIFs would only apply to programs that are funded through annual appropriations, so they would exclude “mandatory” entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. OMB has also indicated politically sensitive programs like veterans benefits and Trump pet issues like ICE and border control will be exempt. There are a lot of questions left unclear by Vought’s big move, reflecting his characteristic strategy of using fear and uncertainty to keep the federal workforce under his thumb. And there is nothing much murkier than the law governing RIFs, particularly during a government shutdown.
Whatever its actual effects, it’s clear the administration’s mass-layoff threats are intended to ratchet up the pressure on Democrats to change their position and vote to keep the government open. What Vought is signaling is that he will take exactly those destructive steps Chuck Schumer feared he might take had a shutdown occurred in March, a major factor in the Democratic Senate leader’s controversial decision to abandon the filibuster against the last stopgap spending bill. The key issue isn’t just which side gets blamed for a shutdown, but how bad a shutdown would be for programs and constituencies important to Democrats.
Having said all that, the immediate Democratic reaction to Vought’s announcement has been fist-shaking defiance, as the Hill reported:
“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one — not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today,” Schumer said in a statement late Wednesday.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries was blunter:
“Listen, Russ, you are a malignant political hack,” Jeffries said. “We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings.
“Get lost.”
Jeffries, of course, has nothing beyond an advisory role in the Senate Democrats’ decision to filibuster the CR or surrender again. The latter decision would undoubtedly enrage Democratic activists and divide the party at a moment when it needs unity more than ever. The idea of giving a victory to Vought and a gloating Donald Trump is for the moment more painful than the shutdown with long-term consequences that may be just over the horizon. A variable yet to be measured is whether congressional Republicans chafe at the mass layoffs and encourage a deal that cancels them. So far this year, their willingness to buck the White House and its agents has been as small as the hope that a government shutdown can be avoided altogether.
Is legislation from the obscure backbench House Republican Jen Kiggans the key to avoiding a government shutdown? Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA/Reuters
At midnight on September 30, the government funding patch Congress enacted in March will expire. That means major federal functions will shut down if Congress and Donald Trump don’t intervene. The time frame for keeping the government open is actually shorter than that, since the House and Senate plan to be in recess for the Rosh Hashanah holiday on the week of September 22.
Unlike the budget-reconciliation procedure that led to the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill, appropriations measures can be filibustered in the Senate, so Republicans need Democratic votes to keep the government open. And the congressional minority is not particularly inclined to cooperate on another bipartisan spending patch as Democratic activists were incensed by their leaders’ cave on spending back in March. At a minimum, Democrats will need significant trophies if they are to supply the seven or eight Senate votes needed to quash a filibuster.
The most obvious trophy would be Trump agreeing to put the kibosh on his Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought’s provocative efforts to cancel previously appropriated spending by executive fiat, which has made Vought a devil figure to people on both sides of the aisle in Congress (not that the Republicans will say anything publicly). In the unlikely event the president did rein in Vought, that might not be enough to tempt Democrats into a spending deal since the threat of a government shutdown is their only bit of leverage for the foreseeable future. Senator Elizabeth Warren has suggested she would only vote for a spending bill if Republicans agreed to scrap the Medicaid cuts in the OBBBA, which is about as likely as Rand Paul joining the Democratic Socialists.
There is one thing that could lure Democrats into voting to keep the government open: a bipartisan effort to extend the tax credits (set to expire at the end of the year) that make Obamacare premiums affordable for a lot of middle-class Americans who get their health insurance from the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. As Punchbowl News reports, Republicans are nervous about the spikes in premiums, which will happen as early as November 1 (when open enrollment for Obamacare policies begins) if Congress doesn’t act to extend the subsidies:
Letting the premium subsidies lapse could lead to more than 4 million people losing health insurance, according to the CBO. Longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin recently said the issue would be the party’s “greatest midterm threat.”
Inflation and rising costs of living are already a looming political liability for the GOP heading into 2026. Republicans are also under heavy fire for the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. So the Obamacare cliff could make those problems worse.
Let’s be clear:Republicans are in charge of Washington, so if premiums go up or huge chunks of Americans lose their health-care coverage entirely, the GOP will get the blame. They privately acknowledge that.
On the other hand, most Republicans hate Obamacare, and for the House Freedom Caucus types who wield so much influence in the party right now, the idea of working with Democrats to salvage premium subsidies is anathema to everything they believe. It is theoretically possible, however, to discern a potential bipartisan coalition to get this done, and it could be a crucial lubricant for negotiations on a more general spending patch as well. There’s even a legislative vehicle in place, per Punchbowl News:
A group of vulnerable House Republicans and moderate Democrats is introducing a bill that would extend the subsidies for a year, pushing the deadline beyond the midterms. This could cost around $24 billion, based on the CBO’s estimate last year.
Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) is leading the bill along with GOP Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Rob Bresnahan (Pa.), Carlos Gimenez (Fla.), David Valadao (Calif.), Young Kim (Calif.), Jeff Hurd (Colo.), Tom Kean (N.J.) and Juan Ciscomani (Ariz.). Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) and Jared Golden (Maine) have signed on, too.
As a sign of the GOP Zeitgeist, Representative Jen Kiggans professes to dislike the Obamacare subsidies but argues they should be carefully phased out rather than abruptly terminated. So in any potential deal the length of the extension could be a big sticking point. And if extending the subsidies indeed becomes the glue that could seal a spending patch, there remain a host of disagreements over the length of the patch and whether any spending reductions accompany it.
Aside from the partisan dynamics in the House and Senate, the entire health-care industry is mobilizing a lobbying blitz to save the subsidies, which are of particular concern to the health insurers that pocket them. Their efforts should keep things bubbling in Congress even if Democrats and Republicans are loathe to reach a deal. It’s possible Democrats will insist on at least a brief government shutdown to show “the base” they are willing to fight Trump’s power grabs. But the unlikely topic of Obamacare could yet provide a bit of bipartisanship amid the chaos and authoritarianism of Trump’s Washington. Some Democrats who might otherwise consider a deal could look out their windows and see National Guard troops patrolling and balk at any accommodation of the GOP.
But arguably some of the most important second-term plans involve Team Trump’s dark designs on the so-called swamp of the federal bureaucracy. Their interest in tearing down the civil service system is well-known, along with a scheme to fill vacant positions created by mass firings of non-partisan professional employees and their replacement via a so-called Schedule F of political appointees chosen for all the top policy-making jobs in the executive branch. The purpose of placing these MAGA loyalists throughout the bureaucracy isn’t just to ride herd on such bureaucrats as remain in federal departments and agencies. These new commissars would also serve as Trojan Horses charged with advising the Trump high command on how to eliminate or disable executive branch functions the new order dislikes or can do without.
A second Trump administration, you see, will be under a lot of pressure from Republicans in Congress and conservative ideologues to decimate non-defense discretionary programs, i.e., most of what the federal government does outside defense (which the GOP will definitely wish to expand) and the big middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare (which Trump has repeatedly pledged to leave alone). Preserving or extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts will force major additional cuts. Non-defense discretionary programs are also where most of the social engineering and income redistribution that MAGA folk hate takes place, in areas ranging from education and environmental protection to health and human services functions. If Trump gets lucky and gets a workable Republican trifecta, perhaps he can go for deep cuts in all these disfavored areas via a vast budget reconciliation bill that Congress will be expected to approve on an up-or-down vote. Otherwise Team Trump plans to excavate a highly controversial device popularized by Richard M. Nixon called “presidential impoundment.”
Impoundment involves a claim by the president of the power to override the spending authority consigned to Congress by Article I of the U.S. Constitution. In minor matters and in consultation with congressional appropriators, impoundment was used by most presidents to nip and tuck undesirable spending. But its aggressive deployment by Nixon was very much a leading feature of his “imperial presidency” that eventually led to his impeachment and resignation from office. Subsequently Congress enacted the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which governs the federal budget process even now, and that makes impoundment claims illegal (presidents do retain a limited power to propose “rescissions and deferrals” of some appropriations, but they are subject to approval by Congress). While presidents have invariably complained about the spending decisions of Congress, particularly when their party did not control it, Trump was the first president since Nixon to talk about impoundment as an inherent executive power that had been unconstitutionally usurped. And indeed, his effort to impound $400 million in money appropriated for aid to Ukraine is what led to his own impeachment in late 2019.
Indeed, Trump’s budget director Russell Vought was complaining about limits on impoundment literally the day before he left office. That’s significant now because Vought, founder of the Center for Renewing America, is heavily involved in preparations for a second Trump administration, and is generally thought to be the front-runner to become White House Chief of Staff. As the Washington Post reports, the Trump team is planning to make an assertion of impoundment powers central to the MAGA takeover of the federal government, beginning on Day One:
Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict.
So in order to reassert impoundment powers Trump and his advisors will push their new set of MAGA appointees in the federal departments and agencies to tell them exactly where to make the draconian cuts they will need. It could all hit Washington like a jack-hammer.
That impoundment has an unsavory association with Nixon does not bother Trump and his minions; there’s already a revisionist Nixon fan club among MAGA thinkers and writers, focused precisely on the 37th president’s efforts to expand presidential powers to the breaking point. And Vought, the likely architect and engineer of this quick 2025 Trump power grab, has few inhibitions, as the Washington Postexplains:
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism….”
[Steve] Bannon, the former Trump strategist ordered this week to serve a four-month prison term for contempt of Congress, touted Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” ready to upend the U.S. government at a recent Center for Renewing America event.
“No institution set up within its first two years [has] had the impact of this organization,” Bannon said. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it.”
