This government shutdown is on track to become the longest in U.S. history. It’s just one of the reasons this shutdown is unique.
Unlike past administrations — including Democratic presidents and President Donald Trump in his first term — this White House has sought opportunities to advance its priorities even as other government work has ground to a halt.
The Trump administration has pursued mass firings of federal employees, permitting of priority energy projects and rollbacks of climate regulations during the shutdown that’s poised to become the longest ever Tuesday night. At the same time, the administration said it would halt some of its work on renewable energy projects and sent home EPA staffers who work on greenhouse gas reporting and energy efficiency.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration found some cash to pay the military but argued it didn’t have the legal authority to fund food-aid benefits. A federal judge Friday ordered the administration to use emergency funding for the food-aid SNAP program.
The administration’s “scaled use” of this government shutdown as an “excuse to stop doing things that they don’t like” is a new tactic, said Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.
The administration is also publicly blaming Democrats for the shutdown — including in banners on government agencies’ websites, videos shown to passengers in airports and in furloughed federal workers’ out-of-office messages.
That “overt use of public resources to make political claims is entirely new,” Stier said.
Also novel this time around is the administration’s push to fire thousands of federal employees during the shutdown. A federal judge has so far blocked the administration’s plans to permanently lay off workers during the shutdown.
Critics of the administration have blasted the move to use the shutdown as a pretext for mass layoffs, which have not occurred during previous government shutdowns. White House budget director Russ Vought previously said it’s appropriate to keep up work on the administration’s priorities where he can during the shutdown.
“If there are policy opportunities to downsize the scope of the federal government, we want to use those opportunities,” he said in an October interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast. “If I can only work on saving money, then I’m going to do everything I can to look for opportunities to downsize in areas where this administration has thought, this is our way towards a balanced budget.”
Trump is traveling, building a ballroom
The optics of the president’s travel and the White House’s remodeling moves have also made this shutdown different, according to government experts and former administration officials.
Trump returned to the United States last week after a swing through Asia for a series of trade talks with world leaders. Earlier in October, Trump traveled to Egypt and Israel to celebrate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
During past government shutdowns, presidents canceled travel plans.
In November 1995, for example, then-President Bill Clinton canceled plans to head to Japan, announcing that Vice President Al Gore would go instead. “It was the president’s concern that the budget be resolved above all else,” one Clinton White House official told The New York Times of that trip cancellation.
Then-President Barack Obama canceled planned stops on an Asia trip in 2013. “The president made this decision based on the difficulty in moving forward with foreign travel in the face of a shutdown, and his determination to continue pressing his case that Republicans should immediately allow a vote to reopen the government,” then-White House press secretary Jay Carney said at the time.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has spent the shutdown demolishing part of the White House to make room for a $300 million ballroom, a move that has sparked a backlash from critics but that the administration has defended as a welcome upgrade that’s being funded by outside donors.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has called criticism of the demolition “fake outrage.”
Some of Trump’s shutdown activities “demonstrate a lack of concern for what is his primary responsibility, which is running our government,” Stier said. In previous shutdowns, “those kinds of choices would have been viewed as a tin ear to the public’s perception of what he should be doing,” he added. “It’s unclear what kind of price he will pay.”
‘Antagonistic’ to the federal workforce
There’s also a notable shift this time around in the administration’s approach toward the federal workforce, said Bob Perciasepe, who served in senior posts at EPA during shutdowns in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
During those administrations, officials “looked as carefully as we could as to what was essential and what wasn’t, and it was based mostly on function,” Perciasepe said. For example, “if somebody needed to be in a lab to make sure that an experiment didn’t collapse, we worked that out,” he said.
That was a contrast, Perciasepe said, to Trump’s stated plans that he wanted to use the shutdown to make cuts to “the many Democrat Agencies.”
Instead of sorting essential versus nonessential programs, this administration appears to be basing decisions on “a perception of which political faction would most support these programs,” Perciasepe said, which is a “different approach to managing a shutdown.”
This administration has also cast doubt on whether the hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees will eventually be paid, in spite of a law signed by Trump in 2019 aimed at ensuring that furloughed workers would be paid after government shutdowns.
Back in 2013, when that Obama-era shutdown ultimately ended, Perciasepe recalled a celebration at EPA’s Washington headquarters, where then-Vice President Joe Biden was on hand doling out breakfast pastries and welcoming employees back to the office.
During the Obama and Clinton eras, the administrations were “extremely supportive” of government employees, Perciasepe said. The Trump team, “seems to be more antagonistic to the federal workforce,” he said.
