Republican leaders in Congress and the White House are sending very different signals regarding the value of federal workers amid the ongoing government shutdown.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other GOP leaders are lionizing federal employees as a crucial piece of the nation’s inner workings, while bashing Democrats for idling “valiant” public servants who help make the country run. They often sound like Democrats in previous shutdowns.
From the White House, President Trump and his top officials are hammering federal workers as a source of deficit bloat while celebrating the “unprecedented opportunity” the shutdown has provided to fire those employees by the thousands.
Instead of venerating the federal workforce, Trump is elevating the stature of Russell Vought, the White House budget chief who’s orchestrating the mass firings — and embracing his Grim Reaper persona — with an outward show of exuberance.
The clashing tones have created a split screen of Republican shutdown messaging, where congressional leaders are extolling federal workers as the lifeblood of a functioning government; Trump is cheering on his administration’s efforts to purge that same workforce; and Democrats are highlighting the contrast to try to make their case to the public.
“Everything that Mike Johnson has said about the government shutting down — everything that the Trump administration has said about the government shutting down — confirms the fact that Republicans are delighted to have shut down the government,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters this month.
Johnson and other GOP leaders on Capitol Hill strongly dispute that charge, arguing Democrats bear the blame for the shutdown because they’ve refused to support the Republicans’ “clean” spending bill, which would extend government funding through Nov. 21, largely at current levels.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had supported those spending levels last March, as part of a similar continuing resolution (CR). But he’s holding the line against the Republicans’ bill this time, citing the need for Congress to address expiring ObamaCare subsidies. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats blocked the legislation for the eighth time since Sept. 19.
GOP leaders say the opposition represents a cruel and undue attack on the nation’s federal workers while threatening their performance of crucial functions, like border security and air traffic control.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), the House Republican whip, said Tuesday. “If the Democrats’ shutdown continues, though, more Americans won’t see a paycheck at the end of this month. Benefits like SNAP will be put at risk. Airports will be flooded with flight cancellations and delays amid the busiest time to travel all year. And the list goes on and on.”
Republican leaders in the Capitol have also pushed back on a memo from Vought’s Office of Management Budget (OMB) suggesting that the government has no obligation to pay those federal workers furloughed during the shutdown.
“I hope that the furloughed workers receive back pay, of course,” Johnson said in response to the OMB threat. “We have some extraordinary Americans who serve the federal government — they serve valiantly and they work hard and they serve in these various agencies doing really important work.”
A distrust in government bureaucrats has been a central tenet of the conservative movement going back at least a half century — a doctrine perhaps best summarized by former President Reagan’s “nine most terrifying words” in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
But Trump has taken that mantra a long step further. After accusing federal workers of being part of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine his agenda during his first term, he’s now determined not to let it happen again in his second.
A major feature of Trump’s return to power has been the mass firing of federal workers — a campaign initially spearheaded by the billionaire Elon Musk, but one that’s continued since Musk’s turbulent departure from the Department of Government Efficiency in May. In some cases, those workers have been replaced by Trump loyalists; in most others, they haven’t been replaced at all.
With the shutdown, Trump has advanced that purge. On Oct. 2, the president said he was set to meet with Vought “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” he wrote on his Truth Social account.
Last Friday, Vought began to make good on the threat, announcing the launch of his “reduction in force” plans for the shutdown.
“The RIFs have begun,” he wrote on the social platform X.
