The Dictatorship
A Trump official issued a directive that will make a government shutdown even more disastrous
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wants Americans to believe that in the event of a government shutdownhe and President Donald Trump have the power to fire swaths of federal employees at will. They cannot. Vought’s vindictive memodirecting agencies to consider reductions in force (RIFs) for employees in programs whose funding would lapse under a shutdown, reads like a coercive power trip. But it isn’t authority. It’s Project 2025 ambition. And it’s wrong — both legally and practically.
There is no statute, appropriation or constitutional clause that gives an administration license to fire federal civilian employees simply because funding has lapsed. When Congress fails to enact a continuing resolution or full-year funding, federal agencies are constrained by appropriations law, not presidential whim. This means that only narrowly defined “excepted” operations may continue, and all other nonessential activities must stop.
Let’s not lose sight of what is at stake. Federal employees are not political hostages.
The linchpin here is the Antideficiency Act. This statute prohibits federal officers from obligating or expending funds beyond what Congress has appropriated. It forbids initiating new obligations in a funding gap. It is the reason that many federal functions cease during a shutdown, and the reason that those federal employees deemed “excepted” work without receiving a paycheck.
In that emergency context, the only lawful personnel actions are to designate which employees are essential and which are nonessential, and then manage the furlough process. The made-up idea that you can layer a full-blown RIF process (with its permanent separations, severance, internal competition, appeals and procedural steps) on top of a funding lapse is fundamentally incompatible with the law.
Attempting to implement “mass firings,” as Vought said, during a shutdown would create new administrative burdens, legal liabilities, severance obligations and significant compensation or benefits questions. That is exactly the kind of commitment to future expenditures that the Antideficiency Act bars when money is unavailable. Vought’s proposal would push him and federal agencies into antideficiency violations and legal jeopardy.
In short, then, Vought’s memo is political intimidation, not valid administrative guidance. The RIF process is no trivial matter. “With strict regulations and processes agencies have to follow, it takes a lot of work and time for agencies to run any RIFs,” Federal News Network reported earlier this year. As experts have warned repeatedly, it is slow, complex, heavily regulated, and often vulnerable to legal challenge. Indeed, many experts see Vought’s plan as unprecedented and legally dubious. “It doesn’t seem to me that they would really be able to legally do that additional work during a shutdown,” former OMB official Bobby Kogan told Federal News Network earlier this week.
“Leveraging the possibility of a shutdown to inject new life into the Trump administration’s massive workforce reduction agenda is yet another stunt at the expense of the civil service,” says Rob Shriver, former acting director at the Office of Personnel Management. Shriver, who now leads the Civil Service Strong program at the legal group Democracy Forwardadds: “It’s clear that Trump’s own agency leaders don’t support his agenda, because they are finally learning how important the work of civil servants is to our country. OMB Director Vought should let his agency HR teams focus on the work needed to manage a shutdown without putting them through a pointless RIF exercise.”
A federal shutdown does not unlock a secret sledgehammer that Vought can take to the federal workforce.
Let’s not lose sight of what is at stake. Federal employees are not political hostages. They are the backbone of our nation’s safety and prosperity. They are the air traffic controllers guiding planes safely through our skies, the inspectors ensuring our food and water are safe, the scientists tracking and combating public health threats, and the law enforcement officers protecting our communities. They maintain our infrastructure, safeguard our environment and advance the research that drives American innovation.
Consider the debacle earlier this year at the National Nuclear Security Administration, where up to 350 employees were abruptly firedonly to have the terminations rescinded days later due to public backlash and national security concerns. Similar stories have played out at the General Services Administrationthe Internal Revenue Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These chaotic episodes underscores the dangers of politicizing federal workforce decisions and highlights the instability such actions can create in critical sectors. Threatening similar mass layoffs during a shutdown would not only disrupt essential services but also erode the trust and morale of the dedicated public servants who keep our nation secure.
So let me be clear. Russ Vought’s directive is an illegal power grab. A federal shutdown does not unlock a secret sledgehammer that he can take to the federal workforce. And while a government shutdown is terrible for federal workers in that they will not get paid until the government is reopened, federal law prevents the Trump administration from mass firings during a shutdown.
Rep. James R. Walkinshaw
Rep. James R. Walkinshaw represents Virginia’s 11th congressional district in the House of Representatives.
NEW YORK (AP) — About 3 million fewer people in the United States had Affordable Care Acthealth insurance plans in February compared with the same time last year, according to new federal data.
In the reportreleased Friday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggested the 13% drop in enrollment from 22.1 million people in 2025 to 19.2 million this year could be attributed to a federal crackdown on fraudulent or “phantom” enrollment. But health analysts said it was more likely related to the Jan. 1 expiration of federal subsidieswhich caused a surge in plan costs that resulted in many people being unable to pay their premiums.
“We know that real people lost their health insurance coverage,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, citing survey findings on people who had left their plans. “This coverage loss happened at the same time millions of people faced double or even triple digit increases in their premium payments.”
The new data, compiled in April but showing coverage in February, represents the government’s first official look at how people’s inability to pay their first bills this year affected total enrollment. That is because the figures capture the marketplace after a nonpayment grace period expired.
A federal estimate in Januaryshowed that about 800,000 fewer people had signed up for ACA plans compared with the same time last year, marking the first time in the past four years that enrollment had been down from the previous year at that point in the shopping window.
Cox said KFF expects the total number of people in the government healthcare program to continue to declinethroughout the year, potentially to a low of about 17.5 million. That would be a significant drop for the government’s flagship subsidized health insurance program for working-age people who do not qualify for Medicaid. In recent years, ACA plans have become a popular choice for gig workers, farmers, ranchers, hairstylists and others without health coverage through an employer.
The ACA subsidies that expired this year were at the center of a bitter fight in Congress last fall, with Democrats and some Republicans calling for their renewal. Sharp increases in health costs across ACA and other health insurance programs come as voters in the approaching November elections say affordability is among their top concerns.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
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