As crucial services grind to a halt and federal workers go without pay, Donald Trump is using the ongoing government shutdown to do what he does best: grab more power.

Last week, as the shutdown loomed, Trump gloated that his administration would use it as an excuse to shutter “Democrat agencies,” whatever that means. It was, the MAGA leader said, an “unprecedented opportunity” that had been gifted to him by “Radical Left Democrats.” Meanwhile, Russell Vought, an intellectual architect of Project 2025 and the current head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), made it clear that the shutdown was an opportunity to simply axe congressionally approved spending mandates, especially if they involved money that disproportionately flowed to blue states. In a memo sent out to all government departments in the days leading up to the shutdown, Vought’s OMB ordered agencies come up with reduction in force plans for projects, programs, and activities that aren’t “consistent with the President’s priorities.” With that directive, the OMB furthered the mission of its head, long a supporter of an unbound presidency, to free up Trump to ignore Congress at his pleasure.

The administration then proceeded to pull $8 billion in clean energy grants from 16 blue states and suspend payments on $18 billion for federal transport infrastructure projects in the New York region. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also announced it would withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of FEMA disaster-preparedness grants from states until they recalculated their populations to reflect the recent mass deportations undertaken by the administration — a naked ploy to revise downwards the populations of large Democratic states such as California, New York, and Illinois — in a likely effort to reduce the number of congressional representatives that they are allotted.

By Friday, as the Senate voted on (and failed to pass) several bills to fund the government, the administration let it be known, through a series of announcements from White House spokespeople and surrogates appearing on right-wing media outlets, that it would soon begin implementing plans to permanently fire thousands of additional federal workers. Ever-pliant House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump’s egregious overreach, arguing that with the shutdown, Senate Democrats had handed “the keys to the kingdom to the president.” While the White House again talked about eviscerating agencies that “don’t align with the administration’s values,” Johnson blamed Democrats for the failure to pass a funding bill and said that they “have now effectively turned off the legislative branch … and they’ve turned it over to the executive,” arguing that mass firings are within Trump’s authority.

Those mass firings have largely not happened yet. On October 1, the first full day of the shutdown, Federal News Network reported that only the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had followed through on the demand to reduce its capacity, firing 1 percent of its workers in order to “focus on mission-critical operations.” In the days since, no additional mass firings have taken place. But the White House has stressed that thousands of other jobs could be on the chopping block. Given Trump’s desire to shrink the federal workforce and to kill off programs and agencies and entire departments that he doesn’t like, the shutdown seems simply a convenient excuse to implement harsh cuts the administration would likely have embarked upon anyway in the coming months.

That they hadn’t begun the chopping by this past weekend seemingly reflects internal divisions in the GOP ranks, with many GOP congressmembers and senators deeply uncomfortable with the sort of across-the-board government reductions that Vought has been championing. But the longer the shutdown continues, and the more that Trump believes he can frame the cuts as being caused by Democratic intransigence during the budget fight, the more the administration could lean into Vought’s take-no-prisoners strategy. In fact, over the weekend Trump began framing potential firings as “Democrat layoffs.”

The list of agencies where most employees have already been furloughed, compared to the list of services deemed “essential” and of “national security” value, may offer clues about where the Trump administration wants to target its culling efforts in the weeks to come. There’s nothing inevitable about how these lists are populated: In a shutdown, the administration ultimately has tremendous discretion as to which employees and agencies it considers “essential” and can mandate to work through the shutdown, and which it views as disposable and can send home.

Turns out — no surprise — that this administration values its hard power federal employees: those whose jobs involve coercion, incarceration, and security. The rest, as they have repeatedly stressed, can be put “in trauma,” in Vought’s unpleasant-but-honest phrasing, or at least made to feel perennially vulnerable.

Ahead of the shutdown, the administration laid out plans to furlough only about one-quarter of the federal workforce, people who would be sent home during the shutdown and wouldn’t be expected to return to work until the government reopened. This represents a lower percentage than in previous shutdowns. The majority of federal employees would still be expected to show up at their jobs, and to work without pay for the duration of the shutdown. Demanding those employees work without paychecks, while simultaneously hanging over the federal workforce the Damocletian sword of potential mass firings, seems like a strategy designed to make employees feel perennially insecure. It makes it harder for them to protest being asked to work without pay or being furloughed from an agency deemed non-critical to the national well-being, since it presents an even more unpalatable alternative: If you don’t like it, the argument goes, we can always simply fire you instead. It’s somewhat akin to a theory of foreign policy associated with Richard Nixon, who believed that adversaries were more likely to comply if they feared him lashing out unpredictably.

The vast majority of employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Labor Department, the Education Department, and other soft-power agencies have been placed on leave for the duration of the shutdown. The shutdown offered the Trump administration a convenient workaround for a recent court order to keep Voice of America functioning and to stop the firing of 500 employees. National Parks have been closed to visitors. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), offices working on climate change issues have gone dark, while divisions reconfigured to work on rolling back climate change regulations remain open for business. Meanwhile, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection, immigration courts, and the rest of the deportation-machine agencies are humming along as if it’s still September 2025; only 5 percent of Homeland Security personnel are being furloughed, compared to 89 percent at the EPA and 87 percent at the beleaguered Department of Education. Meanwhile, ICE has announced that because of the huge influx of cash it received under the recent Budget Reconciliation Act, it will have no problems continuing operations through the shutdown.

Making all of this worse, many furloughed workers report that, without their knowledge, their emails began sending out automatic replies blaming Democrats for the shutdown and for the fact they aren’t at their computers and able to respond to the public’s questions. Government agency websites have subjected visitors to similar messages. Open up the Housing Department’s website, and you are greeted with the following message, which flashes up first in blue, with a red banner across the entire page: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.” Click onto the Department of Agriculture website, and you can read “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”

All of this naked propaganda is a clear violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the civil service from being used for partisan purposes. Yet, the longer the shutdown continues, the more one can expect this lawless administration to ratchet up the political stunts, using every tool in its arsenal to frame the message that it has the interests of the American people at heart while Democrats hold the country hostage to an “extremist” agenda. If the administration does ultimately start firing thousands of federal employees, expect that vindictive measure, too, to be pitched as simply being an unfortunate but necessary response to the “Radical Left’s” efforts to shutter basic government services.

This despite the fact that the GOP controls the presidency, both houses of Congress, and is buttressed by a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court; this, too, despite the fact that what Democrats have asked for is for funding to be restored to insurance subsidies so that millions of families can continue to afford to access health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, and that it is GOP intransigence on this fundamental issue that is standing in the way of a vote to fund government.

This is a shutdown the GOP should have to own. Democrats aren’t responsible for the furloughing of workers, and they certainly won’t be responsible if Trump decides to fire thousands of additional employees in the days to come.