Daniel Medina
30 October 2025
Small Enough to Drown It in the Bathtub
Nearly a million people have been furloughed because of this government shutdown, and as it passes the 30-day mark, their struggles show no sign of ending anytime soon. That number doesn’t even include the thousands of workers who still have to do their jobs but won’t get paid until the shutdown ends.
The GOP controls every branch of government, the White House, the House, the Senate, and even the Supreme Court. They only need seven Democrat votes to end the shutdown. Instead of working with Democrats on a compromise to reopen the government, Trump’s response was literally, “Go forget yourself.”
And all Democrats are asking for is funding for Obamacare subsidies, which help keep healthcare prices lower. But Republicans keep lying and blaming the people who don’t have any real power. Reopening the government should be an easy decision. So why is it about to hit the one-month mark?
“Just a momentary lapse in appropriations—a shutdown that lasts minutes or hours—would give Vought the power to tell agency leaders to move past the usual furloughs—“temporary, nonduty, nonpay status”—to RIFs—being permanently fired. Vought could choose the programs that the administration has been wanting to eliminate and give a very big haircut to others.
The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers. Let me underline this: while the purse is empty, OMB would seize the power of the purse from Congress. The administration could choose to prolong a shutdown for as long as it liked, through poison pills in the negotiations with congressional Democrats, and comb through the government to flatted programs it’s been trying to cut. With this prospect looming, the administration has little incentive to do more than shed crocodile tears over a shutdown.
And then, when the shutdown is over, whenever the administration chooses to end it, those employees who were furloughed would come back on the payroll, with back pay, through a 2019 law. The employees who were RIFed would not.
This would be an historic—and incredible—invention of a backdoor impoundment. OMB could prevent the administration of programs it opposes by gutting the government’s capacity to administer them. The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress.
To top it all, this would all be perfectly legal.”
Meaning, because of the government shutdown, Vought, one of the authors of Project 2025, could use it as a loophole to permanently fire workers instead of just furloughing them. This would also allow the administration to slash or shut down programs they don’t like, effectively taking Congress’s power over the budget for themselves, all while still claiming to follow the law.
It feels like the real-life version of Grover Norquist’s 2001 quote: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
These leaders don’t care about actually governing, and they don’t care about you.
