I write fluidly across different venues. Here, on social media, in emails with readers … and I sometimes lose track of where I’ve said what. So I wanted to agree with something TPM Reader XX1 says in this email I flagged. I’m skeptical the White House will follow through on their threats to carry out a new wholesale round of firings, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is threatening. I’m not saying they won’t. They totally might. So this isn’t something I’m relying on or telling you to rely on. I’m just skeptical for two reasons. The first is that this White House doesn’t need a shut down to fire people. Despite the law-breaking it entails, they’ve made clear that, with the Supreme Court’s assistance, they can fire as many people as they want. If they thought it helped them to fire more people, they’d be doing that already; the shutdown provides zero new legal power to fire anyone.
“Want” is the key word here.
The White House is already hiring back a substantial number of fired workers because they’re not able to run things with such a depleted workforce. That’s not because they believe in good government. They’re doing it because it’s causing problems which either upset key Republican stakeholders or threaten the president’s popularity.
They are the government. They run it. They own it. They can say they’re going to fire everyone except the military and ICE. But the blowback is on them — non-functioning services, delayed checks, government facilities closed, flight delays, government workers without paychecks, etc. Those things are unpopular. They’re a big reason why Trump himself gave in after a few weeks in 2018-2019 when he closed the government down on himself demanding money to build his wall.
You can maybe win a Washington rhetorical showdown over who is at fault for the shutdown, though I’m skeptical about that. But if you fire people permanently, they’re still gone and things still aren’t functioning six months later long after the shutdown is over.
The whole logic of the Republicans’ shutdown argument is that the shutdown sucks, people will think it sucks and that the public will blame Democrats for doing it and pressure them to stop. The permanent firing threat means the White House is going to make that permanent even after the Democrats have apparently thrown in the towel. There’s a big problem with that strategy.
In any case, the folks in charge inevitably take the hit for things not working, the economy being bad, inflation rising, etc. If there’s a real lesson from the shutdowns and hostage-taking dramas of the Obama era, it’s that the public blamed Republicans for their shutdown antics in the moment but the general climate of dysfunction and austerity it caused was taken out on the party in power, i.e., Obama and the Democrats.
I won’t belabor the point. The White House’s rehiring spree tells me clearly enough that they’ve already hit what they believe is the optimum level of firings for their own political self-interests. I doubt they’ll exceed it. If they do, I think they’ll pay the price for it.