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Russ Vought’s empty shutdown threat

The OMB director says that if Democrats don’t cave, he will do mass layoffs. Imagine that.

The Trump administration is careening toward a government shutdown in its usual hyper-erratic fashion. Under the current Senate rulebook, government funding bills need 60 votes to overcome the inevitable filibuster, meaning at least seven Democrats are needed.

Here’s the situation: House Republicans have passed a party-line funding package, while Senate Democrats put up a counterproposal rolling back the cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid in the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Both failed. Then, as my colleague David Dayen explains, Trump first agreed to have a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders, then abruptly pulled out at the last minute, by way of a traditional incoherent wall of text posted on Truth Social. This made it crystal clear who is responsible for the shutdown: Donald Trump.

Now the Trump regime has a new tactic: Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought recently threatened that if the government shuts down, he will permanently lay off any of the affected workers he doesn’t approve of, rather than just temporarily furloughing them.

There’s just one problem: This threat makes no sense.

First, the Trump regime has already been doing tons of mass layoffs, as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE and other efforts. The idea that Democrats should leap to attention over some new layoff threat is absurd.

These firings have consistently been found to be illegal, as in a recent decision reversing the mass firing of “probationary” employees—which included not just new hires, but people who had recently been promoted.

Alas, as usual with Trump and the legal system, the judge didn’t actually force the workers to be rehired. However, DOGE’s illegal layoffs have been so comically incompetent, performed by wet-behind-the-ears fascists with no government experience whatsoever, that the administration has been forced to hire hundreds of laid-off people back.

So there is every reason for Democrats to think that these layoffs will be found illegal, and even if they aren’t, the administration will be forced to reverse course eventually. None other than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pointed this out in a statement. “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.”

More fundamentally, the Trump regime has displayed an utter contempt for law as such, as well as bargains of any kind, since its first day in office. The president is a man who thinks he is above the law—and has been confirmed as such by his corrupt lackeys on the Supreme Court—and glories in betrayal for its own sake. Everyone from large media conglomerates, to elite Ivy League universities, to foreign allies and adversaries alike, has found this out the hard way.

It follows that even if Trump agrees to some deal with Democrats, they should expect him to break his word for no other reason than he enjoys doing so. They should stick to their demand for major concessions, and some mechanism of enforcement stronger than trusting the world’s least trustworthy man. Until that time, the shutdown is entirely on Donald Trump and his party.

– RYAN COOPER

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