News comes today that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is now threatening not to pay back pay to federal employees after this shutdown ends. There’s both more and less here than meets the eye. The step Vought has taken is to remove references to back pay from OMB guidance about the shutdown. The backpay rule is not based on OMB guidance. It’s federal law. And even better than that, it’s a federal law Trump signed.
Yes, yes, I know: federal law isn’t a big constraint on Trump White House planning. Make of that one what you will. But I want to zoom in on something else. The big, big threat coming from Vought was that the Trump administration would use the opportunity of the shutdown to institute large-scale firings of federal employees on the unsupported theory that the shutdown opened up more powers to fire federal employees. That’s not true. But that doesn’t matter. Because the Supreme Court has already given Trump power to fire as many federal employees as he wants, federal law notwithstanding.
I noted a week ago that there’s another constraint most of the press seemed to ignore: self-interest and public opinion. The administration is already hiring back a substantial number of employees fired in the spring. They didn’t just start believing in public service. The firings were affecting both important MAGA coalition stakeholders as well as the President’s political standing generally. If the White House wanted to or felt it could fire more federal employees, it would.
The threat of widespread firings has continued to figure prominently in national press reporting. But, as I noted last week, down at the ground level, in departmental and agency HR offices, the machinery of firings isn’t actually moving. There’s a lot of evidence that this is and was a bluff the White House didn’t feel able to follow through on. This new line about withholding post-shutdown make-good salary makes that seem even more likely. If the first threat was real why hasn’t anything happened a week into the shutdown? Why are they moving onto a new threat that actually seems much less legally viable than the first one?
I’m not saying federal employees should light a cigar, kick back and feel like they’re living on easy street. It’s their livelihood and immediate well-being at stake. But in the larger political context it seems clear that a huge amount of the DC and national political conversation is simply ignoring what’s happening in real life and focusing only on White House statements. Are national reporters checking on whether RIFs are being prepared for this new round of firings? It seems like most are not. Are they asking why they’re moving on to a new threat while failing to follow through on the first one?
Looking at the actual situation unfolding — as opposed to Russ Vought’s and Donald Trump’s social media feeds — suggests the White House is in a much weaker position than people seem to think.