Dem
47
GOP
53
Elon Musk liked to think of himself as co-president, but he never was. He was simply an outsider, an immigrant at that, who provided cover for Donald Trump to kill government programs MAGA didn't like and then blame someone else. But there is a co-president (and it is not J.D. Vance, either). It is Russell Vought.
Vought sees the shutdown as the opportunity of a lifetime. He wants to ruin the federal government so badly that a Democratic president in 2028 could spend 4 years trying to put it back together and still fail. Vought has already started his plan by firing over 4,000 federal workers in Education, Health and Human Services, the EPA, Treasury, and Homeland Security. On Friday, for example, dozens of workers at the CDC were fired outright and the D.C. office was shut down, with more to come. All in all, HHS began firing over 1,100 workers Friday. At Treasury it was over 1,400. By law, workers being fired must be given 30 days' notice, but who cares about the law when you have the power? Nevertheless, lawsuits have already been filed.
This is not normal. The script for the standard kabuki theater play used during a shutdown is that workers are furloughed for the duration, then they come back and get all their missing pay. Vought is trying to change the script this time by permanently firing people on the assumption that the Democrats don't want to see people hurt, so they will cave. He and Trump don't give a rat's a** about the workers, of course.
But it is possible that this one time, Democrats might see the larger picture, not cave, and loudly announce that Trump, not the Democrats, is who is firing people. They could win the PR war on this because when things go wrong, people tend to blame the president. (V)