I get why he wants to do it, mainly that he’s an asshole, but how does the shutdown facilitate the firings?
From here.
The White House budget office is instructing federal agencies to prepare reduction-in-force plans for mass firings during a possible government shutdown, specifically targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue.
So they are jobs that are no longer funded after October 1. My guess is that the goal is to eliminate these jobs before they get funded with a budget agreement.
Or, it’s part of Project 2025.
Or, a temper-tantrum.
We must face the possibility, or even the likelihood, that Trump himself does not know.
Remember that “reason” and “excuse” are not synonyms.
It doesn’t, and he can’t. It’s a political ploy and a way to try to get leverage on Democrats.
In fact, it’s unlikely that the HR personnel required to implement such a RIF would be considered “essential workers” that would even be on the job during a shutdown.
Although I concur that with your adjudication of Donald Trump’s character, there is actually a very practical reason why he is trying to take this opportunity to fire federal workers who are not in ‘protected’ roles; to accelerate the dismantling of the administrative state as outlined in the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership. By eliminating these jobs during a shutdown under the thesis that there is not funding, they can then dismantle significant portions of these agencies themselves such that even if courts order the firings reversed, there are functionally no jobs or facilities to return to. (This is also why GSA was trying to cancel leases on hundreds of buildings used by federal agencies earlier this year; eliminate the role and you obviate the reason to have someone in it.)
I know some people have tried to frame this as the shutdown being executed as a distraction from ‘the Epstein Files’ but in reality this has been planned out long ago, and part of the reason for accelerating attacks on Medicaid and other entitlements is to force a showdown over the budget that would result in exactly this scenario. Democrats are in a lose-lose positions with this shutdown because if they had agreed to support a continuing resolution to prevent it they’ve lost all bargaining power with respect to Medicaid and other cuts, and if they block it (as they are) they facilitate this strategy. What I do not understand that, with the exception of a handful of ‘progressive’ Democrats, they have not been screaming about this at the rooftops for months because that this was the plan all along is obvious to anyone who even skimmed Mandate for Leadership and The Heritage Foundation’s supporting arguments. That people are just sitting still for this is astonishing because it isn’t just ‘liberal’ agencies like USAID or National Institutes of Health that are being cut; it will be agencies like the FDA, the US Forest Service, the National Parks Service, and even elements of the Department of Defense and Department of Energy. It was bad enough the there were the DOGE cuts to NOAA, NASA, or NIH/NSF research funding that actually cut across ideological lines but these will cut that the core of services that help protect wildlands and federal resources, support agriculture, and even make sure that the military is capable of procurement and payroll. It will gut the administrative state, even the parts that they actually need to achieve their own Christian Nationalist agenda, and they’re doing it because they imagine that they can take this all over with ‘private’ support even though we’ve seen how very well that has worked out so far.
Some light reading in the shutdown in the context of Project 2025:
Stranger
I do want to point out that if Graham was serious about demystifying Project 2025 for the layman, and not policy wonks, he wouldn’t be charging money for his book- he’d release this for free in the interest of the common good.
Wouldn’t that then make it a manifesto?
Damned if I know. I’m just getting at the fact that if this guy thinks it’s so important and urgent, why’s he trying to make a buck from it?
Alternatively, people would say that if it was publishable he wouldn’t have to print it out as a self-published manifesto. No win situation.
Because this is how he makes a living? For those who have never done it, researching, organizing, and writing a book––especially one that is going to be held up to journalistic standards––takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort. It is basically a full time job, which for someone who doesn’t have the savings or means to take a hiatus or leave their current employment, is basically a second job that also becomes an obsession and often a real albatross as the ‘fun’ part of doing exploratory research is done and the initial notes and draft chapters have to be organized to form a coherent and factually-verified narrative, and then receiving endless rounds of editorial notes and rewrites to get it up to a publication standard. This is why the ‘self-published’ books that you see (even the ones that aren’t AI generated) are pretty uniformly bad and often unreadable. I’m constantly amazed at the people who think that journalism should be both unsubsidized and free to them. Good investigative and explanatory journalism is an arduous process of drilling down to the facts and delivering them with the appropriate context for general readers while excising the extraneous and distracting. It is difficult work done well by a pretty small pool of largely unrecognized people.
Most ‘layman’ don’t give a wet shit about Project 2025 even when you explain it to them in explicit detail. “Oh, it’s just more politics. Trump doesn’t really mean it. I just voted for him ‘cause he’s good for business.”
If you want a good and ‘free’ précis of Project 2025, here you go:
Most people just do not value what you give them for free regardless of how useful or informative it is. The perverse fact is that the more you want someone to listen to you, the more you should charge, especially if you don’t have anything particularly insightful to say. Look at all the chumps going to Tony Robbins seminars for thousands of dollars to get the same level of questionable content you can get for free by watching a few TEDx talks on YouTube.
Stranger