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 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 (OMB), 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 the power 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 non-essential 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 1 versus Article 2, 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 they seem 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.

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed