A Shutdown Where None of the Normal Rules Apply

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

This is the Daily.

Under normal circumstances, the profound pain of a government shutdown compels both parties to negotiate as quick a resolution as possible on behalf of the American people.

But so far, nothing about this shutdown is normal.

Today, As the federal shutdown enters its 17th day, three of my colleagues, White House reporter Tyler Pager, Congressional reporter Katie Edmondson, and economic policy reporter Tony Rahm, explain what's making it feel so different.

It's Friday, October 17th.

Katie, Tyler, Tony, welcome to the roundtable.

Thanks so much, Michael.

Good to see you, Michael.

How you doing?

Doing great.

I just need to observe that saying those names in quick succession makes me feel like you're a family like maybe a family of tigers katie tyler tony katie tyler tony tony the tiger they're great

uh

welcome to a special shutdown edition of the roundtable it's a topic that i think benefits from having specialized reporting experience brought to the topic.

And I think each of your specialties can emerge as we go.

I just want to start with a simple observation.

This is a real weird shutdown.

Yes or no?

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, without a doubt.

And let's talk about the ways in which it is a weird shutdown, Tyler, starting with you.

Yeah, we have never seen a White House or an administration weaponize the federal government against the opposing party the way in which we're seeing it happen right now.

Right.

In a shutdown.

I mean, clearly people have weaponized perhaps Trump, especially government in the past, but you're saying weaponizing a shutdown.

Yes, absolutely.

They are trying to use the closure of government to pursue their political goals and also inflict political pain on the Democratic Party.

And what's the most vivid example of that?

Aaron Powell, if you were to log on to any federal government website, you will be greeted by a message from that department or agency.

If you look on the Treasury Department website, it says right now, quote, the radical left has chosen to shut down the United States government in the name of reckless spending and obstructionism.

You know, you can look at airport videos.

There are more than a dozen airports around the country refusing to display a video of Christy Noam, the Homeland Security Secretary, who put together a new video blasting Democrats for the government shutdown and any travel disruptions that may result from it.

Right.

And those are just message weaponizations, right, Tony?

There's actually funding and job cut weaponizations as well.

Right, absolutely.

This is not just rhetorical.

This is an attempt to inflict real pain on the president's political enemies, in this case, Democrats.

And they have done this on a number of fronts.

They have taken steps to halt or cancel billions of dollars that the federal government had previously approved for cities and states and congressional districts led by Democratic leaders.

They have taken steps to fire thousands of federal workers who serve at agencies that the president, at least, believes to be, quote, Democrat agencies or on Democrat programs.

How can an agency be Democratic under a Republican president?

Yeah, it's a great question.

And I think the president has used this phrase Democrat agencies or Democrat programs as shorthand to describe kind of two different things.

The first is agencies and programs that largely track the areas that Democrats increased when President Joe Biden was in power.

Things like health and education and housing and research.

But I think second, more broadly, this White House sees the function of government as inherently democratic.

And they see the cuts to the work of government as bringing government more in line with their vision that Washington and the bureaucracy should have less of a role in people's lives and in the management of the economy.

Right.

Katie, I want to talk about another very weird element of this shutdown, which is the manner in which, even as the president has weaponized it and used it to wield partisan warfare, he's simultaneously immunized many corners of the government and the public from the traditional consequences of a shutdown.

Well, that's right.

And I think the biggest example, Michael, is that he has taken a number of actions to ensure that U.S.

military personnel, that the troops continue to get paid, despite the fact that Congress has not passed any spending bill to ensure that they would be able to get their paychecks as normally scheduled.

Where did he find that money?

Well, it's a great question, Michael.

We're still trying to figure that out exactly ourselves.

They initially told us the administration initially indicated that there were some unspent funds over at the military meant for research and development, probably of weaponry.

Again, we don't, I think, exactly know.

Tony, can the president just move money around like that in a shutdown?

Like take money from pot X to pay people Y?

Well, I think the best way to answer that question is maybe.

You know, as a general rule, Congress writes laws.

It tells the president how to spend money, and the president has to spend money on those things that Congress told him to spend the money on.

There's a provision in law that allows the president to move some money around at the Department of Defense, but the amount is capped and the use of that money is restricted.

You can't just grab a bucket of money from the Department of Homeland Security and use that to, you know, pay for something at the Department of Energy.

And so that's what's made the president's actions so remarkable and in some ways unorthodox here, because he has pushed the limits of his ability to reprogram parts of the budget without Congress.

Right.

And Katie, is it right to think that very few people have any incentive to sue the president to stop him from paying troops with money, even if the origin of that money violates the spirit of a law.

Yeah, I can't think of anyone who would want to take up that particular fight.

And we saw that reflected up on Capitol Hill, where you actually had Democratic leaders, including Hakeem Jeffries of New York, say that he was happy to see the troops continue to get paid.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And privately, though, when you talk to some of these folks on the Hill and elsewhere, they will tell you that they are super concerned.

Because even though they like paying the troops, they have this concern about this ends justify the means argument that the administration is sometimes making with the budget.

Because for, you know, right now it's okay that he's using money for a purpose that both parties would like to see him spend it on with the troops, but nothing is to say that the president will continue to push that envelope in ways that would see him use the money for more controversial purposes, perhaps in defiance of what Congress has said.

Got it.

Katie, where else has the president been able to immunize the normal pain points of a shutdown?

Aaron Ross Powell, well, I do just want to return sort of quickly back to the idea of keeping the troops paid.

I think, Michael, a lot of people thought that this first deadline in which the troops were going to miss their regularly scheduled paycheck, they thought that that was going to cause Democrats to buckle and to cave and to say, all right, you know, we view ourselves as the responsible governing party, and so we can't let this happen, right?

We will vote for this Republican stopgap bill to reopen the government.

And in deciding essentially that he wanted to insulate himself from the blame of the troops not getting paid, President Trump also sort of extended that insulation, I would say, to Democrats, right, who now will not be getting calls from angry troops, wives of troops, right, saying, where's our paycheck?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

He took away, the president, the urgency of ending the shutdown, kind of on all sides.

Yeah, that's right.

That was a big one.

Now, obviously, there are a number of other federal employees outside of DOD who are missing those paychecks, right?

And we should not forget about them.

But the troops has always been sort of one of the biggest pain points.

I mean, we're also seeing, and again, this is more insulation, I would say, of the president himself.

He said that he is going to take similar actions to ensure that law enforcement agents continue to get paid.

We believe that is going to include FBI agents, ICE agents, potentially.

And that is an area now where you have Democrats, if not angry, certainly extremely uncomfortable because you are seeing the White House pick and choose which agencies they they want to continue to fund and which they don't.

Well, I wonder if we can linger for a second on the federal workers who are not being paid like the troops are, who is not getting paid, who is being fired, and who is not getting their normal funding in a way that is genuinely impacting them.

Yeah, with a few exceptions, most of the government remains shut down.

And so as a result of that, there are hundreds of thousands of civilian employees at agencies that touch on functions like housing and health and education who are furloughed right now.

They're out of work, they're not receiving pay, and the administration has not taken any steps to reprogram the budget in a way for these individuals to be paid.

In fact, the president and his aides at times have suggested that some of these hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers may not even be automatically

entitled to back pay once the shutdown ends.

Meaning they're permanently unpaid for this work.

Potentially.

I mean, there is a law that, in fact, President Trump himself signed at the end of the longest shutdown in U.S.

history that

guaranteed these individuals back pay.

But the White House has tried to interpret that law in a way that may suggest that they won't provide that automatic back pay.

So there are hundreds of thousands of people who really do have their finances at risk here.

And that's on top of those that the White House has now said it's potentially looking to fire.

Because Because President Trump and his aides have made very clear that in their attempts to weaponize this shutdown, they also want to conduct another round of mass layoffs.

And they began to take the steps to do that.

last week when they announced an initial batch of about 4,000 federal workers across eight major agencies that they were going to cut from government in a process that will take about 60 days.

That has been the subject of litigation.

A federal judge recently blocked the administration from proceeding with those layoffs, but the president and his aides have made clear that they're not backing down and they really do want to cut government.

And so if those people are in fact laid off, that's just another financial blow on top of what they're already experiencing.

Tyler, how does the White House, your beat, how does it talk about its strategy during this shutdown of essentially weaponizing the shutdown to in theory hurt Democrats?

I have to imagine that when you're laying off 4,000 people from a bunch of agencies, and I think one of them was Homeland Security, there's absolutely no way you can contain the negative impacts to one party.

Yeah, look, the White House is taking a very hardline stance on this.

And they are saying that it's up to the Democrats to reopen the government, and then they are willing to negotiate over health care subsidies, which is at the core of why Democrats are not reopening the government.

Right.

And I think, you know, the big picture is the polling on this is muddled and somewhat mixed with, you know, the latest poll showing that both Democrats and Republicans are receiving blame for keeping the government closed.

When some of this new polling came out, I was at the White House and showed it to a senior White House official who told me that that was good news for the White House.

Why?

Because historically, the president receives most of the blame for a government shutdown and the political blowback because Americans assume that it's in the control of the president and his party to keep the government open.

Is there a sense in the White House that that can last if, for example, air traffic controllers don't get paid, stop showing up at work, and suddenly air traffic is a nightmare across the country?

Or when healthcare premiums are

going up at the end of this year, which is what Democrats are banking on happening, And it's why they shut the government down because the president and Republicans won't work with them to

reestablish those subsidies.

Is that their thinking?

Or do they recognize that the politics could shift from 50-50 back to something much more damaging for the president?

Michael, it's a really good question.

And one of the other unique features about this shutdown is the lack of energy within Congress and in the White House to try to get a deal done.

In past shutdowns, we would see the president going to Capitol Hill or holding meetings with congressional leadership in the White House trying to hammer out a compromise or a deal.

The president held one meeting with top Democrats and Republicans from Capitol Hill, and beyond that, he's had very little engagement.

And so the sort of frenzied energy you would see has been replaced by the president's focus on other issues, on the Middle East peace deal.

He's expected to go to Asia next week.

He's talking about Venezuela.

He's making an announcement about IVF.

There's just so many other things the president is more interested in talking about and focusing on that the shutdown is not even the top issue animating the White House at this point.

But do you remember, Tyler?

And I bet you do, and Katie and Tony, feel free to weigh in on this.

There was a brief moment about five or six days into the shutdown where the president, I believe in the Oval Office, looks at the cameras and says, I think we should probably negotiate with the Democrats to come up with some good solution.

And by good solution, I mean we should be talking to them about health care.

And it was like, oh, the president recognizes that the healthcare situation in the country is potentially bad for him, bad for his party.

He wants to do a deal.

And then it never happened again, as if like someone had said to him, that's a very bad idea.

Yeah.

I mean, the sense is that Republicans on Capitol Hill didn't think that was the right message.

Republicans have been very adamant that they want to reopen the government and then negotiate on healthcare.

And Trump trampled over that messaging by basically opening the door to negotiations.

And that is not the stance of the Republican Party.

And it was really a rare moment in this presidency where Trump was forced to sort of redirect his messaging based on feedback from Congress.

But the question, Michael, is how long he's willing to do that as this shutdown continues to drag on.

Okay, well when we come back, I want to, Katie, ask you what this all looks like from the Hill, from Congress, and whether you think Tyler's right that Congress is driving the agenda in this shutdown, or whether it's really the president.

So we'll be right back.

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Katie, right before the break, and Tyler, please tell me if I'm correctly channeling you, you suggested that congressional Republicans to a degree are dictating how long will the shutdown go on and under what terms will it end?

Even as Trump, it seems, is very much dictating who experiences the pain of the shutdown.

Again, Tyler, correct me if I'm wrong.

I want to understand then, on Capitol Hill, where Republicans and Democrats are at complete loggerheads over the idea of reopening the government, who is likeliest, potentially, to lower their guard and abandon their position here and bring the government back to life.

Well, Well, Michael, I think what is interesting about this moment is that every time in Trump's second term that he's wanted Congress to do something, they've done it.

And so if Trump decides at any given point that he's had enough and he wants the shutdown to end, he has shown the ability to persuade the Republican Party to fall in line.

And so far, he has largely kept an arm's length away from the shutdown.

He has railed against Democrats for keeping the government closed, and he has weighed in on which workers should get paid like the troops, but he has not really dived into the fight going on on Capitol Hill.

Okay.

Katie, since Tyler just talked about the Republican side of this, can you talk about how the Democrats on Capitol Hill are seeing this moment, seeing the polling, seeing the weaponization that's directed at them, and seeing the question of health care that they think makes this all worthwhile?

Well, they think that they have found a winning issue in centering this shutdown around health care.

Their bet is that as people continue to get letters in the mail informing them how much their healthcare premiums are going to go up, that they are only going to get more and more public support.

And that even I think in a worst case scenario for them, if the ACA subsidies are not extended, then they have a ripe issue to run on in the midterms.

But I think, Michael, part of what is fueling the impasse on the Hill is real anger from Democrats over the way that the administration administration is weaponizing this shutdown.

In the days before the government actually shut down Russ Vote, the budget director teased the idea that they would use a shutdown to accelerate their campaign of mass layoffs of federal workers.

And I think the calculation from the White House was that that was going to cow a number of centrist Democrats, maybe those in particular who have large numbers of federal workers in their states.

I'm thinking of people like Mark Warner of Virginia, Tim Kaine of Virginia, two pretty centrist members who sort of pride themselves on negotiating through gridlock.

I think the calculation was that maybe the White House would be able to peel off a handful of Democrats like those men and get them to join Republicans in keeping the government open, or in this case now, reopening the government.

And if that was the calculation, it has completely backfired, right?

These are two normally pretty affable men, having covered them for seven years now, and they are furious.

And they have constituents who are federal workers who have been coming up to them in the grocery stores, telling them, you know, look, I started the year getting the Doge email, being asked to report five things I did this week.

Now I'm laid off.

This administration is out of control.

Keep up the fight.

Wow.

That is the message they are getting now.

Not bring the government back so I can get paid.

Keep up the fight.

Well, that's right.

And to hear these Democrats tell it, they're saying, look, if you're going to say that you're using this shutdown to lay off federal workers, well, you were already doing that before the shutdown happened.

You actually already did that back in March when I, as a Democrat, voted to keep the government open.

So why should I vote to reopen the government now?

And I think just to add on to Katie's point, this is one of the first moments in Trump's second term where Democrats have had any leverage.

as it relates to the functioning of government.

They are in the minority in both the Senate and the House.

And a big part of the the Democratic base has been agitating for Democrats to try to stand up in some way to Donald Trump.

The last time Chuck Schumer helped Republicans keep the government open, there was serious backlash to him.

And there is this energy in the Democratic Party to try to pressure their leaders to do something, to really stand up to Trump, because Republicans need a handful of them to go along with anything to reopen the government.

Yeah, I think Katie is absolutely right that this is emboldening Democrats to keep fighting, even though they have seen pretty staggering cuts in some cases to their states and districts as the president has weaponized this shutdown.

But I think the reason that's happening is because they have this deeper worry about the ways in which the president has asserted his power to rearrange the budget and to do so in a way that disregards what Congress may say about what he must spend or what he must not spend.

Many of the areas that the president has looked to cut and the layoffs that he has looked to make, particularly during the shutdown, track with the things that he proposed to do as part of his 2026 budget.

He wanted to cut agencies like housing and health and energy and education, which are the very programs that he has targeted during the shutdown, with the layoffs that the court has now blocked and with the other sorts of, quote, permanent cuts that he has said he is pursuing and could potentially put out later this week.

Okay, but let me point something out.

You said in that answer that a reason why the Democrats believe in this shutdown is because they see it as an act of resistance to an executive branch under Trump that's getting bigger and stronger and doing things that Congress is supposed to do.

And yet, is it right to think that the shutdown is giving the administration a chance to basically experiment with treating the entire federal budget as the province of the executive branch rather than needing to follow the direction of the legislative branch, which appropriated and passed the money.

I'm thinking about the fact that that money to pay the troops was basically borrowed from some research fund, right?

I mean, is that kind of stuff happening throughout the government right now?

Is the executive branch basically acting like Congress when it comes to who's getting paid, who's not getting paid, who's being punished by being defunded?

I think that this administration is always trying to test that, and that this this shutdown has just been the latest stage where they're trying to act that out.

And I think the president himself has said this.

I mean, on numerous occasions, he has described the shutdown as a, quote, unprecedented opportunity to make changes to the budget.

Because I think on some level, the White House does see this as a little bit of a win-win.

Like, I don't think that they want the government to be shut down, but I think that they're going to extract the greatest number of benefits that they can out of it while the government is shut down.

And they're going to do that with the help of folks like Russ Vogt, who runs the Office of Management and Budget, and has long preached this idea that the president should have expansive power to set the nation's spending levels and to defy Congress.

So, this has just been, at least in the eyes of the president, a great opportunity to push further down this road of taking power over the nation's budget from lawmakers.

Katie, what do you say to that?

When this shutdown is over, is there a fundamental rebalancing of power away from Congress to the president?

Michael, I think that had already happened before the shutdown.

I think the shutdown has sort of twisted the knife even more in sort of this wound in regular appropriations, if you will.

I mean, look, I went and talked to a Senate Republican who is on the Appropriations Committee, is a chairman.

And I asked him, look, there's a real trust deficit right now between Democrats and your party, between Democrats and the White House.

Is there anything that you can do to try to give some sort of assurance that in the future, when Republicans and Democrats on the Hill come to some sort of a propes deal, that the White House is not going to unilaterally try to undermine it?

What can be done?

And his response was, well, I don't think the president would approve any of those safeguards.

And so we're not going to have the votes for it here on the Hill.

So we're just going to have to work through that.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: In other words, the president will never agree to essentially respect the traditional role of Congress.

Exactly.

And that was a sobering thing to hear from someone who sits on the Appropriations Committee.

So how does this come to an end?

And when does it come to an end?

I wonder if each of you can just briefly offer us what I hope is not an irresponsible prediction, given how weird this shutdown is, as we've firmly established, and the complex disincentives to end it right now.

I'll posit two things.

One is, Michael, as you alluded to earlier, if we start to see real impacts on Americans' daily experience beyond federal workers, if planes are being delayed, air traffic controllers are not showing up to work, if we really start to see acute impacts from the continued shutdown.

I think a second thing is when and if President Trump really does get engaged.

He has focused on other things during this period.

He's referenced the shutdown and discussed the shutdown, but he has not made it a priority of his to end.

The White House feels confident that the shutdown is more harmful to Democrats than it is to the president and his political party.

If the fortune changes there and Trump decides he wants to end this once and for all, I think that will be a key turning point.

What do you say, Tony?

I would just echo exactly what Tyler said specifically on the impacts of the shutdown.

You know, before we all sat down here, I was talking to some state officials who administer the program called Food Stamps.

It's federal nutrition assistance for low-income Americans.

And they told me that because of the shutdown, because of how long it had gone, in some cases, they've had to stop accepting applications for new benefits.

And they're worried about being able to pay benefits in the month of November.

That's not something that's shown up in the data, right?

It has not hit Americans' pocketbooks just yet, but it will.

It'll happen soon.

And I think as you start to see cases like that throughout the economy, on top of the broader hits of the U.S.

economy at a moment where things are pretty fragile, I think that's the kind of thing that might start to get folks in the room and actually trying to make a deal against the backdrop of a White House that hasn't always stuck to the deal when it comes to federal spending.

And Katie, I'll stand with you.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, I think it depends on what the deal looks like.

Democrats are banking on President Trump's instinct of wanting to make a deal, wanting to protect his party from devastating health care attack ads in the midterms.

They're really counting on that instinct kicking in and on President Trump engaging and negotiating some kind of deal with them.

I think that's one potential off-ramp.

I think there's another potential off-ramp, which I think is not palatable to Democrats at this moment in time, but could be down the road in which they agree to reopen government at the same time they get a vote on the ACA subsidies that they know will fail.

And then they can say, we voted for this, we tried to do this, and then campaign on that in the midterms.

That's what we call half a loaf.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's why I think a lot of Democrats think that that would be an unpalatable option right now down the road, particularly if we start to see some of those painful impacts kick in.

I think that could maybe change.

But I do think there are a number of off-ramps here that are quite obvious, frankly.

And it's just that no one is interested in taking them right now.

And does that almost by definition mean that this is going to be the longest shutdown in U.S.

history and that it could even go to the end of the year?

I mean, I think a lot of people view Thanksgiving as being a potential inflection point because of travel, the air traffic controllers.

But right now, I don't know.

And also, I think one of the things is the administration is unlikely to be able to continue to move funds around to keep programs open and troops paid.

And so that pain point has been nullified for the time being.

But White House officials have privately conceded to me that is not a long-term solution.

And so when that runs out.

When that runs out.

And when might that be?

I think that's unclear.

Some officials have posited to me that they could do it through the end of the month, but given the sort of unique and non-traditional ways they've been doing it and the lack of transparency, we don't even precisely know exactly how the money is being found to pay them right now.

It's hard to exactly predict how much longer they're able to do this, but it's not a forever solution.

And so, should that run out, that could be a turning point as well.

All right.

Well, Tyler, Tony, Katie,

like I said, you sound like a family of tigers.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

Thanks so much, Michael.

Thanks, Michael.

Thanks.

On Thursday night, the Times reported on President Trump's latest unusual budget maneuver during the shutdown.

He now plans to pay ICE officers by drawing from funds approved in a tax cut bill passed in July.

That would circumvent Congress, which did not approve new spending for ICE before the government shut down on October 1st.

We'll be right back.

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Here's what else you need to know today.

The military commander overseeing the Pentagon's escalating attacks against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean, which have so far killed at least 27 people, now plans to resign.

The Times reports that the commander, Alvin Holsey, has raised concerns about killing the alleged drug traffickers.

Many legal experts say that the airstrikes carried out against those alleged traffickers have no legal justification.

And

on Thursday, a grand jury in Maryland indicted former National Security Advisor John Bolton over his handling of classified materials.

Bolton, an outspoken Trump critic since leaving his administration, is the latest Trump enemy to be targeted in the second term.

after former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

But unlike the the Comey and James cases, the investigation into Bolton began during the Biden presidency and appeared to follow normal procedures within the Justice Department.

Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Shannon Lin, and Stella Tan.

It was edited by Chris Haxall and Paige Cowitt, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for the daily.

I'm Michael Bobaro.

See you on Monday.

We all have moments when we could have done better.

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Yikes.

Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato.

Ouch.

Could have done better.

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