Democrats’ shutdown strategy hinges on a risky bet

The Trump administration will use a government shutdown to gut the Democratic Party’s favorite federal agencies.

Or at least, this is what the president wants Democrats to believe, as they negotiate over a bill to prevent federal funding from lapsing on October 1.

Last week, White House budget director Russell Vought instructed federal agencies to consider mass firings, in the event of a shutdown. Vought specified that such downsizing should be confined to departments that President Donald Trump does not care much about: Agencies vital to the president’s agenda — such as Homeland Security and Defense — should be spared.

This led the Washington Post to declare that a shutdown may yield “a federal government dramatically reoriented to defense, immigration and law enforcement — and not much else.” Building such a streamlined administrative state has long been an objective of conservative hardliners, one they touted in their infamous “Project 2025” agenda. According to the Post, Vought and his allies believe a shutdown would give them an opening to realize those ambitions.

Six months ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer thought the same. In March, Schumer decided to help Republicans keep the government open, precisely because a shutdown would abet their war on the federal bureaucracy. “Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel ‘non-essential,’ furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired,” Schumer said. “In short, a shutdown would give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, and Russell Vought the keys to the city, state and country.”

Schumer has evidently changed his mind.

Republicans have offered his party a seven-week continuing resolution, which would continue funding the government at current spending levels through November 21. Democrats have thus far refused to back such a measure, insisting that any spending measure include, among other things, a reversal of Trump’s Medicaid cuts and an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at year’s end.

If a shutdown would actually trigger the conservative movement’s long-awaited triumph over the administrative state, then Schumer’s new position would seem reckless.

But there are some reasons to think that Trump is bluffing.

First, the president has no greater legal authority to permanently fire civil servants during a shutdown than he does in ordinary times.

When the federal budget lapses, many government functions dependent must pause and the workers who served those functions must be furloughed (i.e., suspended temporarily without pay).

But the administration cannot legally convert a furlough into a firing without navigating all of the ordinary constraints on downsizing agencies. Many federal workers enjoy strong civil service protections. And many government functions are congressionally mandated. Effectively suspending enforcement of environmental laws by mass firing Environmental Protection Agency staff is no more lawful in the context of a shutdown than it is today. To the contrary, during a shutdown, most agencies would not be legally allowed to execute personnel changes unrelated to the shutdown itself, as their HR departments would not be funded.

Of course, this White House has little reverence for constitutional constraints on its behavior. And it did all but abolish USAID — firing the bulk of its staff — in a breach of congressional authority. A federal district court ordered the administration to restore funding for the agency, finding that Trump’s actions violated both federal law and the Constitution. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overruled that decision. (The Court has not made a “final determination” on the constitutionality of Trump’s actions, but gave the administration the go-ahead to withhold USAID funding until such a determination is reached.)

Nonetheless, if the administration wanted to gut every agency with a vaguely liberal mission on bogus legal grounds, it could already be doing so.

And there’s reason to think the administration does not actually wish to implement Vought’s vision. After all, it already abandoned a similar plot. Elon Musk’s DOGE spent Trump’s first months trying to radically downsize virtually every government agency. But once Trump’s own hand-selected department heads were in place, they pushed back against Musk’s machinations, as they did not want their new fiefdoms to be rendered wholly incompetent.

Further, paring back the federal government to “defense, immigration and law enforcement — and not much else” would be politically explosive. Many voters would notice the abrupt lapse in other government services, as IRS help lines go unanswered, new Social Security claims go unprocessed, the FDA’s drug approval process slows to a halt, the State Department’s backlog of passport applications balloons, FEMA’s distribution of disaster aid slows, or various other agency functions get disrupted.

In other words, there are practical, political reasons why the Trump administration has not implemented Vought’s blueprint for a miniscule administrative state. And those considerations would not disappear amid a shutdown.

All this said, it is conceivable that Schumer was right the first time — and that Trump really would use a shutdown as a pretext for disemboweling the regulatory state.

The White House’s response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination may be a relevant precedent. The fatal shooting of that conservative commentator did not give Trump any new legal authority to crack down on progressive nonprofits, activism, and speech. But Trump has nevertheless used that shocking development to do precisely that.

If Trump’s team believes that its most radical objectives are politically tenable in an emergency — but not in normal times — then they might well escalate their attacks on the federal bureaucracy amid a shutdown.

Legally, the administration has no more authority to ignore the civil service protections of a furloughed worker than those of an actively employed one. But politically, refusing to rehire civil servants who are already suspended might seem easier than dismissing those currently on the job. Likewise, the administration may feel more comfortable maintaining reductions in government services than initiating them.

It still seems likely that the White House is exaggerating the radicalism of its shutdown plans, so as to secure more leverage over Senate Democrats. But we can’t know that with certainty. Democrats will therefore be taking a high-stakes gamble, if they decide to call Trump’s (apparent) bluff.