___The Trump administration is using the government shutdown to target Democratic-led states and priorities, while preserving some of its own key issues, as the Office of Management and Budget warns layoffs could begin within a matter of days.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Wednesday the agency was canceling $8 billion in Biden-era energy projects “to fuel the Left’s climate agenda” in states won by Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, including Colorado, California, New Jersey and New York, though it’s unclear what projects specifically will be affected.

The administration also halted $18 billion in funding for two major New York City infrastructure projects—the Hudson Tunnel and Second Avenue Subway—to “ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” Vought said, with the Department of Transportation warning a review of the funding could take longer due to the shutdown.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has preserved some of its key priorities during the shutdown, including construction of a White House ballroom, an unnamed administration official told ABC News, claiming the project is not funded by congressional appropriations, while offices that handle tariffs and immigration enforcement will retain more staffing than in previous shutdowns, according to Politico analysis of internal government documents.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/10/01/government-shutdown-begins-white-house-guts-funding-for-democratic-favored-projects/

I think this is not a bluff. It’s entirely possible that the Republicans wouldn’t mind at all taking the short-term hit of whatever blowback there may be from a government shutdown in exchange for gaining more power over both the budget and the personnel system. They’ve been campaigning across the board for the power to be able to fire anybody they want to fire, from Federal Reserve Board members to people working in local social-security offices. There is a large group of people on the right, many of whom work inside the administration, who believe that the president has that power — that all federal employees ultimately are at will, and they think they can trace it back to the time of the founding. So they want to try to establish that policy and use this as a precedent, and then combine that with the power of impoundment. So I think they would not be very disappointed if it turns out they can blame the Democrats for having triggered the shutdown, then use that shutdown to be able to expand the president’s power into areas where they’ve wanted to move.

I can’t get inside their heads, and this certainly is not what I would recommend to anybody, but it could work something like this: There’s no money appropriated, there’s no continuing resolution, and there’s a shutdown. So then there’s a question of what actually gets shut down. And OMB, as it turns out, is who decides which employees and which functions are essential and which ones are not. Russell Vought has already said that he’s going to tell everybody that the most essential functions are ones that were in the Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the ones that weren’t are not. So they could say, “We’re really sorry, but you’re gone, because you’re doing a nonessential function and there’s no money to pay you.”

And I imagine it will be a challenge to get that overturned, since the Supreme Court has been very much on Trump’s side with this sort of thing.
That’s true, but even before you get there, it would be hard for the most liberal justices to argue that OMB needs to be punished because it’s committing to spending money that Congress hasn’t yet appropriated. It would really put the Supreme Court in the middle of a separation-of-powers question of Article One versus Article Two, where it doesn’t really have a role. What’s the court going to do? Say you have to spend money that Congress hasn’t appropriated?

There is a looming Supreme Court case about those very issues: separation of powers and impoundment. The Trump administration is trying to claw back foreign-aid money for AIDS patients that Congress already appropriated. On Friday, the Supreme Court gave permission for the Trump administration to withhold that money for now, but the case itself won’t be resolved for a long time. Is that the only thing holding the Trump administration back from pretty much controlling the power of the federal purse?

They don’t have a single thrust against impoundment that they’re using — it’s that they are working on multiple fronts. So the question, at this point, is whether or not they are cleverly trying to trigger a shutdown so they can even more fully expand their power, beyond what I think perhaps maybe even they imagined at the beginning. And that, I think, is a very real possibility.