The U.S. federal government shut down on Wednesday morning with both parties unable to come to a budget agreement. It’s the fourth budgetary shutdown of Donald Trump’s presidencies as he and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought are trying to aggregate as much power as possible to rebuild the administrative state in their image as they unilaterally seize funds allocated by Congress and try to circumvent civil service laws to fire public employees.

Being mostly a con artist and grifter, Trump is primarily interested in being praised and using the public treasury as his personal piggy-bank. But Vought has much larger ambitions, ones that are far more dangerous.

In a 2023 interview with a far-right Christian podcast, Vought said that his public policy was motivated out of a desire to force America to “understand the reality that it has to obey God.” New York Times reporter Coral Davenport profiled earlier this week the many ways in which Vought is implementing this fanatical vision, even as she (unfortunately) downplayed its religious origin.

While Vought is historically talented as a Republican administrator, his larger vision of a government that focuses its spending on military and policing rather than public service is very much in line with decades of reactionary Republican tradition.

In this podcast discussion, we give an overview of what Vought and Trump are doing and how it fits within the “unitary executive theory” which was developed within the Reagan Administration during the 1980s.

We also discuss how shutting down the government seems to have been forced upon Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as his popularity among the Democratic base has plummeted to such a degree that more of his voters disapprove of him than approve. It’s clear that the American people need and want a real opposition party to manifest as Trump and Vought are assaulting American liberty and public administration.

Please visit Matthew’s website, Flux, and Don’s website Can We Still Govern, if you would like to hear more from us individually in the future.

Audio Transcript

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MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: [00:00:00 ] Hey, everybody. this is another Live Theory of Change episode. Thanks for being here and, thank you to Don for being here. so, Don, just if you can, for let’s maybe give a little brief introduction of ourselves to our respective audiences, just to let people know. so why don’t you go ahead and go first.

DON MOYNIHAN: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. I’m Don Moynihan, I am a professor of public policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I study government, I study public administration, and so I’m very interested in what’s happening right now.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, this is definitely a time for your field of research, no question.

Hey everybody, I am Matthew Sheffield, and I am a, podcaster and writer, and I write about the, psychology of politics and the history of religious authoritarianism. And so, Intersects well with, who Russ Vought is, and we will talk about that, as we get into it. so, but why don’t we, kick off here as we’re getting started with, let’s just do a bit of a lay of the land.

So, today’s Thursday, October 2nd, and the government was shut down as of midnight on Wednesday Eastern time. So, where do things stand right now, Don?

MOYNIHAN: So, a shutdown has commenced, what is standard at, this point is that some percentage of federal employees are deemed as essential and they continue working, but without pay.

Some federal employees are deemed non-essential, and they are basically told to go home. Do not open their computer, do not perform any tasks until the shutdown is resolved.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, that’s right. And, are they being paid during this shutdown or.

MOYNIHAN: They are not being paid. [00:02:00 ] And typically we assume that federal employees will get back pay, after the shutdown ends.

So Congress will usually pass some sort of legislation to ensure that they do not lose out financially as a result of it being unable to pass, appropriations bills on time. But currently, if you’re a federal employee, you are not getting paid.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. and, during the, or leading up to the shutdown and as it’s been continuing, the, Trump regime has been saying that they’re going to use the, shutdown as an opportunity to engage in massive layoffs, as a threat to kind of attempt to force Democrats to, reopen the government, at their, with the Republican demands and.

It’s a, it looks like at least as of now, that the, Senate Democrats, and this is the Senate Democrats who we’re talking about here because the house already passed the continuing resolution, the de Democrats have said that they believe that Trump was going to do these layoffs anyway. And that’s a very good surmise, I would say.

MOYNIHAN: Yeah. and this is where we start to move from what is typical with shutdowns to what is now, I think, pretty unprecedented. so we don’t have any previous shutdown where one of the negotiation tactics on the part of the president was to say, if you don’t go along with me, I’m gonna fire a bunch of employees.

Like that is completely new. And from a legal perspective, there is nothing happening with the shutdown that requires Russ Foul or Trump to fire employees or reduce services in, in that way. Right? There’s no legal mandate. And I think this is an important point because there’s gonna be a lot of disagreement about this in the coming days.

You heard [00:04:00 ] Trump, I think yesterday saying If, there’s a shutdown, there has to be layoffs. Not true. The layoffs are a choice. They are not required by law, and we certainly don’t see them in precedent. and so this moves the ball much further of away from what we’ve seen in the past. Senate Democrats are the only actors here with a real opportunity to negotiate because they are the only ones who can filibuster continuing resolution at this point.

And they’ve chosen to make healthcare subsidies. the thing that they’re going to argue over, whether that’s a good strategy or not, we’ll find out. but that, as of a week ago, the dynamics were basically, you have Senate Democrats saying. Extent healthcare subsidies, they’re very popular.

You cut them during the summer. and Republicans say no. And now we have Democrats saying the same thing and Republicans saying, not just no, but the longer this goes on, the more we’re gonna fire public employees and increasingly the more we’re gonna cut money going to blue states. So this is another thing that is new vote is also, impounding spending going to blue states, billions of dollars in infrastructure to New York City, billions of dollars in environmental spending going to eight blue states. and so this sort of aggressive one ups one upmanship is really a break from the past.

SHEFFIELD: It is, yeah. And one of the other aspects of in which they’re doing that is that they are forcing, or I guess they’re not forcing yet.

But they are advising employees and administration officials to put up anti-democratic messages on their websites or in their auto out of office replies. and that is unprecedented. And, it’s, it is using the gover, the machinery of [00:06:00 ] government to, for explicitly partisan ends.

And, everybody often talks about the Hatch Act, quote unquote. but that’s, it’s obviously dead, but, to be in, in, all honesty, it was never really enforced, the way that it should have been. And this is one of the results of it, I would say.

MOYNIHAN: I think it, it can be selectively enforced.

I mean, there was a period not so long ago where it was sort of enforced, but imagine if you were a federal employee and you posted on the government website that Trump was to blame for the shutdown. You would probably be investigated for Hatch Act violations. You’d probably be fired first, and then maybe investigative for that, or imagine that your emails contained anti-Trump messaging.

And that was deemed to be a violation of the, norm and legal expectation that federal employees don’t use resources for campaign purposes. you could expect to be investigated. And so partly it feels like the Hatch Act is a, like a sort of dead letter, not because the law has been repealed, but the Office of S