These are, of course, very small tweaks to the overall federal budget. But it’s possible a partial government shutdown would simply give Trump more ideas for cuts worth keeping. In the past, government workers are simply furloughed and given back pay later, once the government reopens; this time, the administration has given “an additional directive to agencies, telling them ‘to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force’ notices to lay off federal employees,” per The New York Times. Democrats—and federal government employees who do pointless work or do important work poorly—stand to lose.

Russell Vought, the White House budget director who keeps a picture of Calvin Coolidge in his office, stands to gain. He served in Trump’s first term, then spent the Biden years biding his time, watching and waiting and preparing for the possibility of his guy retaking office, formulating plans for how to use an expansion of executive power to shrink the overall size of the government. Vought specifically hopes to set up “a legal battle over Congress’s power to decide how government money is spent, potentially creating a new legal precedent for the president to block spending on any programs and policies he dislikes,” according to the Times. To provoke such a battle, Trump is trying to cancel $5 billion more in foreign aid—called a “pocket rescission”—without congressional approval, authority he is claiming under the Impoundment Control Act.

Vought call the unelected bureaucracy a “cartel working behind closed doors.”

“We have a president who understands fully what is in front of him,” said Vought at the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month, referring to the administrative state. ( The whole thing is worth a read to understand his mindset.) “We would never say that Congress doesn’t have the power of the purse to appropriate, but the executive has the power to spend. And this was built on the foundation of what we learned and brought from the principles of the U.K., and that was an important notion: that Congress sets that ceiling, and presidents have the ability to spend less if they think it’s important, to prevent waste and abuse. And, literally, 200 years of presidents did this, from George Washington up until Richard Nixon.”

Vought continues: “And then at the lowest moment of the presidency, what do we have? We have the Impoundment Control Act that upends and says it is no longer a ceiling, it is a floor, you have to push all the money out the door. And that now orients the bureaucracy, who now have career civil service protections, to orient not from the president of the United States, but to the Congress that controls the purse strings. And so, we have a fundamentally different system. In some respects, it is a revolution that occurred over the last 100 years.”

It’s not yet clear how the Supreme Court will respond to the legal battle the administration is setting up, whether Congress really will shut down the federal government, and how exactly a shutdown under second-term Trump will look.

Scenes from New York: Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Eric Adams announced he would be ending his bid for re-election. This leaves the race to Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent.

Adams has been…actually pretty decent (and very good if you’re judging by the metric of personality). Ending his campaign with a long, emotional video set to Sinatra’s “My Way” is just classic Adams. He’s a little corrupt; he’s a little heartfelt; he’s a little embarrassing. I kinda liked him.

“This campaign was never about me,” he said in his video, referring to his original run for office. “This campaign was for the underserved, the marginalized, the abandoned, and the betrayed by government.” Adams has always understood that fundamental truth of politics: You must be oriented toward the people, and actually listen to the things they want, not attempt to get them to want whatever ideas are percolating in progressiveville. The former cop knew that people in the most underserved, crime-ridden areas of New York didn’t want “defund the police” talking points but actually safe subways they could use for their long commutes, and a corresponding police budget that enabled the police to do their jobs as best they could. He was a pretty normal guy: swaggy, corny, willing to be bribed by the Turks once he realized they were offering to give him nicer airplane tickets (who among us), somewhat ideologically and tribally flexible.

As for this election, “major change is welcome and necessary,” Adams said at one point, seemingly referencing his socialist opponent Mamdani. “But beware of those who claim the answer is to destroy the very system we built together over generations.” (He believes Cuomo to be “a snake and a liar,” a line he keeps repeating.)