The 'Look What You Made Me Do' Phase of the Shutdown [View all]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-10-03-look-what-you-made-me-do-phase-of-the-shutdown/



The White House withheld urgently needed infrastructure funding from a state that didn’t vote for him for president. It unilaterally cut energy grants appropriated by Congress because they don’t meet with the president’s views. It fired workers deemed superfluous. It kept in operation what it likes and took out of operation what it doesn’t like. All of the above happened before the October 1 government shutdown, and the fact of the shutdown doesn’t change the fundamental illegality of these actions (though what is “legal” with a Supreme Court giving their Special Boy Donald Trump whatever he wants is a difficult metaphysical question). We have hit a phase in the shutdown where Trump and his lieutenant Russ Vought are making decisions they’ve always wanted to make and blaming Democrats for forcing them to make them. You can call it the “look what you made me do” phase of the shutdown.

This is just as unpopular as the original DOGE terror campaign on the federal government, making even Republican members of Congress uncomfortable about their losing the moral high ground during the shutdown. But Democrats aren’t capitalizing the way they should, because they continue to emphasize the wrong remedy for these persistent power grabs. The first thing Vought did after the shutdown was to withhold $18 billion in infrastructure spending from the New York subway and train tunnel under the Hudson River. This is no different than withholding $4 billion from the high-speed rail project in California back in July, which was also a punishment to a disliked state. We know what was done in New York City was unrelated to the shutdown, because Vought said it directly. The money is being withheld “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” Vought said on X.

This is a tell. Vought has no authority to cancel spending in a shutdown, so he made up a rather ridiculous excuse about diversity hiring to justify punishing New York. In fact, it’s the same DEI excuse made to partially justify canceling high-speed rail funding, before the shutdown. If DOGE 2.0 Commissar Vought wants to DOGE something, he’ll DOGE it, regardless of whether appropriations have lapsed. Vought’s second action, canceling $8 billion in grants to blue states for climate mitigation projects, similarly was just something he wanted to do anyway. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought posted. Would this Green New Scam funding have been allowed if the budget bill had passed? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled hundreds of climate-related grants, including this recent action to end the Solar for All program.



The energy grant cuts are going to hit red states, too, because taking a hatchet to federal programs is a blunt instrument. But it’s all just more of the same, illegally canceling things Trump and Vought don’t like, whether there’s a shutdown or not. What Vought is doing is pretending that the shutdown gives him some authority to engage in a DOGE rampage—a pretense enabled by the blinkered stories in many media outlets. That goes also for the so-far threatened mass layoffs, which so far have been only a threat. Vought is literally the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose workforce he has tried repeatedly to reduce by 90 percent. As many people as the courts will allow Vought to fire, he will fire, shutdown or no shutdown.

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