A top adviser to Donald Trump echoed the president’s threats of mass federal layoffs across the government if Democrats in Congress do not agree to vote to reopen the government soon.
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House Economic Council, made the warning on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. White House officials spent the past week taking varying positions on whether the president relished causing staff reductions at federal agencies, while the president himself seemed to imply as much.
Hassett, on Sunday, warned that Democrats needed to come to the table on Monday or the White House would take action.
“I think that President Trump and Russ Vought are lining things up and getting ready to act if they have to, but hoping that they don’t,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Layoffs will begin “if the president decides that the negotiations are absolutely going nowhere.”
Hassett added that he hoped “we can get the Democrats to see that it’s just common sense to avoid layoffs like that.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, on CBS and NBC, laid the blame for those potential layoffs squarely on Democrats — despite criticism that his party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, the latter of which is making the threats.
Johnson, denying that he or the president “wanted” to use the threat of mass firings as leverage, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was to blame for his caucus opposing a House-passed clean continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government. Schumer opposed using a shutdown as leverage to halt DOGE cuts earlier this year, but is now backing that strategy in the hopes of forcing Republicans to extend subsidies for Obamacare public exchange health care plans.
Democrats are not buying the president’s threats or the White House’s attempts to soften the language used by some advisers to the president — and Trump himself — about potentially engaging in mass firings seemingly for the purpose of scoring political points.
Members of the minority party attacked Trump for claiming he’d target “Democrat agencies,” rhetoric which suggested to many of the president’s critics that he viewed federal agencies as inherently hostile to his agenda.
A Republican senator’s comment to Fox News this past week, suggesting that Russell Vought, the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, had been waiting “since puberty” to carry out mass layoffs, was also a revealing look into the divide among the president’s defenders on the issue.
“As for the Speaker telling you or not telling you his position on the president threatening the mass layoffs of federal employees — there’s no one forcing him to do that,” Sen. Adam Schiff told MSNBC on Sunday.
“He will do that because he wants to do that, because he and Russell both want to cause even more pain for the American people,” added the senator.
And Schumer, on CBS and NBC, responded that Johnson and his fellow Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, were being dishonest when they claimed they were open to negotiations on the topic of Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies — but only after Democrats voted to reopen the government.
“Later means never,” the Democratic Senate leader told Margaret Brennan. “Johnson does not want to do it.”
“He’s just not serious about it, as exemplified by him sending the House home for two weeks,” added Schumer.
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, are reportedly equally divided over the prospect of causing further federal chaos to put pressure on the Democrats. Some warn that the strategy risks collapsing the remaining credibility Republicans have with some voters over the shutdown fight.
“This is certainly the most moral high ground Republicans have had in a moment like this that I can recall, and I just don’t like squandering that political capital when you have that kind of high ground,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, a Republican, told CNN last week.
Trump himself has kept up the pressure on Democrats in his own way — by issuing threats — while on Sunday, he attacked Fox News for the conservative network’s decision to invite a Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, on air to discuss the shutdown.
“Why is Fox News and Peter Doocy putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare?” Trump said, before seemingly suggesting that the cable network should pick whether or not it to remain on his side: “Fox should either get on board, or get off board, NOW, but at this point, it just doesn’t make any difference to me. They suck up the Ratings because of us, and then spin them in the Democrats’ direction.”
