Wednesday dawned to find the federal government shuttered for the eighth straight day with no clear end in sight. Yet again the Senate would fail to find the votes for the continuing resolution House Republicans passed before fleeing Washington last week. The White House is going through the traditional motions of lamenting the lack of agreement on Capitol Hill. But even as the effects of the funding lapse begin to pile up, the Trump administration’s sharpest arguments and strongest efforts to end the shutdown clash heavily with the long-standing goals of the MAGA agenda.
Axios first reported Tuesday that a draft memo from the Office of Management and Budget argues that federal workers furloughed during this shutdown may not receive back pay once funding is restored. OMB’s novel reading of the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act would result in a major financial loss for an already demoralized workforce. The yet unissued guidance is being framed as a leverage point to get Senate Democrats to back down on their demands to extend key Affordable Care Act subsidies and pass a short-term bill funding the government at current levels.
The White House’s strongest efforts to end the shutdown clash heavily with the long-standing goals of the MAGA agenda.
The memo dovetails neatly with a previous threat from OMB Director Russell Vought that the shutdown would be a harbinger of new mass layoffs of federal employees. Congressional Republicans clucked their tongues and shook their heads sanguinely at this latest White House overreach, insisting that they had no power to block Vought from undertaking such an unpleasant task. “Russ does this reluctantly,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unconvincingly insisted last week. “He takes no pleasure in this.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., likewise claimed that Democrats were to blame for “handing the keys to Russ Vought,” adding that he and his colleagues “don’t control what he’s going to do.”
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has been hitting all the usual political notes for a shutdown, drawing focus on the hardships the chaos in Washington breeds. She solemnly warned Monday that food benefits programs for families in need and new mothers would soon run out of money if Senate Democrats don’t yield. It’s exactly the kind of spotlight on the victims of a shutdown that usually sours public opinion against its instigators, which have by and large been Republicans.
But the good cop/bad cop routine underway falls flat when you stop to consider what Vought would be up to even if the shutdown had been averted. He has been extremely transparent about his desire to use any excuse available to massively shrink the federal workforce, no matter how questionable the legal grounds. And as my colleague Jarvis DeBerry noted last week, President Donald Trump’s claims that any government shutdown necessitates layoffs are blatantly false. The shutdown only provides the flimsiest pretext to continue doing what would be on the docket anyway.
It’d be a tough sell for the White House even without the difficulty the administration is having from hiding its collective grin. Leavitt’s foreboding also rings hollow when you consider how much of a chunk Republicans already slashed from the food security safety net in their so-called big, beautiful bill earlier this year. In failing to provide any funding for the programs at all, the shutdown merely takes the GOP’s default position on those benefits (providing as few as is politically tolerable) to its logical endpoint. It defies credulity to then use the potential suspension of benefits as a political cudgel. Even the few attempts to mitigate the shutdown’s damage, rather than amplifying it, can be viewed as an executive power grab. Leavitt on Tuesday said that the White House would transfer revenue from Trump’s tariffs to fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC. It’s entirely unclear how that would work under the current laws that fund WIC or governing tariff revenue. It does, however, bolster Vought’s overarching desire to further sever Congress’ hold on America’s purse strings, relegating spending bills to mere guidelines. Why bother passing spending bills if the president can directly use the Treasury Department as a debit account? Republicans in general are ill-suited to argue that the shutdown is a problem, given their decades-long campaign to limit federal power. MAGA adherents are particularly poor messengers, many of them having gotten their political start in the tea party-fueled shutdown era from the early 2010s. These rampant contradictions may help explain why, as my colleague Zeeshan Aleem pointed out Monday, Democrats aren’t seeing the normal fallout for their hard-line stance against reopening the government. It’d be a tough sell for the White House even without the difficulty the administration is having from hiding its collective grin.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
