The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

There is a grim fascination in the 1929 stock market crash, when Americans watched with horror as the bottom fell out of the economy. In our memories, reinforced by jerky black-and-white newsreels, that crisis shows businessmen aghast as fortunes disappeared in heavy trading that left the ticker tape that recorded prices running hours behind only to toll men’s destruction when it finally reached the end of the day’s sales.

‘The Day Trump’s Big Oil Megadonors Paid for’: EPA Chief Zeldin Announces Rollback of 31 Landmark Environmental Regulations

Today the Senate passed a stopgap measure from the House of Representatives to fund the government for six months through September 30. The measure is necessary because the Republican-dominated House has been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in 2025. Congress has kept the government open by agreeing to pass a series of continuing resolutions, or CRs, that fund the government at the levels of the previous budget. The most recent continuing resolution to keep the government funded expires at midnight tonight. The Republicans in the House passed a new measure to replace it on Tuesday and then left town, forcing the Senate either to pass it or to kill it and leave the government unfunded.

The new measure is not a so-called clean CR that simply extends previous funding. Instead, the Republican majority passed it without input from Democrats and with a number of poison pills added. The measure increases defense spending by about $6 billion from the previous year, cuts about $13 billion from nondefense spending, and cuts $20 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service. It forces Washington, D.C., to cut $1 billion from its budget, protects President Donald Trump’s ability to raise or lower tariffs as he wishes, and gives him considerable leeway in deciding where money goes.

House Democrats stood virtually united against the measure—only Jared Golden of Maine voted yes—and initially, Republican defectors on the far right who oppose levels of funding that add to the deficit appeared likely to kill it. But Trump signed on to the bill and urged Republicans to support it. In the end, on the Republican side, only Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) voted against it.

Like the House, the Senate is dominated by Republicans, who hold 53 seats, but the institution of the filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate to end it, gave Democrats room to stop the measure from coming to a vote. Whether they should do so or not became a heated fight over the past three days. To vote on the measure itself, Republicans needed 60 votes to end the potential for a filibuster. To get to 60 votes, Republicans would need some Democrats to agree to move on to a vote that would require a simple majority.

The struggle within the Democratic Party over how to proceed says a lot about the larger political struggle in the United States.

House Democrats took a strong stand against enabling the Trump Republicans, calling for Democratic senators to maintain the filibuster and try to force the Republicans to negotiate for a one-month continuing resolution that would give Congress time to negotiate a bipartisan bill to fund the government.

But Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he would support advancing the spending bill. He argued that permitting the Republicans to shut down the government would not only hurt people. It would also give Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk full control over government spending, he said, because under a shutdown, the administration gets to determine which functions of the government are essential and which are not.

In an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, Schumer noted that Musk has said he was looking forward to a government shutdown. Jake Lahut, Leah Feiger, and Vittoria Elliott reported in Wired on Tuesday that Musk wanted a government shutdown because it would make it easier to get rid of hundreds of thousands of government workers. During a shutdown, the executive branch determines which workers are essential and which are not, and as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo highlights, Trump has issued an executive order calling for the government to stabilize at the skeleton crew that a government shutdown would call essential. Yesterday was the government-imposed deadline for agencies to submit plans to slash their budgets with a second wave of mass layoffs, so at least part of a plan is already in place.

Schumer said that Trump and the Republicans were forcing Democrats into a choice between a bad bill and a shutdown that would hand even more power to Trump. “[T]he Republican bill is a terrible option,” he wrote. “It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address this country’s needs. But…Trump and Elon Musk want a shutdown. We should not give them one. The risk of allowing the president to take even more power via a government shutdown is a much worse path.”

There appeared to be evidence this morning that Trump and Musk wanted a shutdown when before the vote had taken place, Trump publicly congratulated Schumer for voting to fund the government, seemingly goading him into voting against it. “[R]eally good and smart move by Senator Schumer,” he posted.

But as Schumer and a few of his colleagues contemplated allowing the Republicans to pass their funding measure, a number of Democrats called on them to resist the Trump administration and its congressional enablers. House Democrats urged their Senate colleagues to take a stand against the destruction Trump and Musk are wreaking and to maintain a filibuster. At the forefront, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) mobilized her large following to stop Schumer and those like him from deciding to “completely roll over and give up on protecting the Constitution.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House, backed Ocasio-Cortez, issuing a statement calling the choice between a shutdown and the proposed bill a “false choice.” She called instead for fighting the Republican bill and praised the House Democrats who had voted against the measure. “Democratic senators should listen to the women,” she wrote, who have called for a short-term extension and a negotiated bipartisan agreement. “America has experienced a Trump shutdown before—but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse. Democrats must not buy into this false choice. We must fight back for a better way. Listen to the women, For The People.”

In the end, Schumer voted to move the measure forward. Joining him were Democratic senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Gary Peters of Michigan, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Independent Angus King of Maine. One Republican—Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky—voted against moving the measure forward.

Once freed from the filibuster, Senate Republicans passed the bill by a vote of 54 to 46, with New Hampshire’s Shaheen and Maine’s King joining the Republican majority and Republican Rand Paul voting against.

And so, the government will not shut down tonight. But today’s struggle within the Democratic Party shows a split between those who lead an opposition party devoted to keeping the government functioning, and a number of Democrats who are stepping into the position of leading the resistance to MAGA as it tries to destroy the American government. Praise for those resisters shows the popular demand for leaders who will stand up to Trump and Musk.

In a similar moment in 1856, newly elected representative from Massachusetts Anson Burlingame catapulted to popularity by standing up to the elite southern enslavers who had dominated the government for years. Blustering, threatening, and manipulating the mechanics of the government, southern lawmakers had come to expect their northern political opponents, who valued civil discourse and compromise, to cave. Southern leaders threw their weight around to gather more and more power over the country into their hands. Finally, in 1854, they overreached, forcing through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted them to spread human enslavement into the American West. In the following elections, northerners sent to Congress a very different breed of representatives.

On May 22, 1856, pro-slavery representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina came up behind Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and beat him nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner had given an antislavery speech Brooks found objectionable. But rather than pleading for calm and compromise in the wake of the attack, Burlingame had had enough. On June 21 he rose and gave a speech about his colleague and his state, calling it “Defence of Massachusetts.”

Burlingame stood up for his state, refuting the insults southerners had thrown at Massachusetts in recent speeches and insulting southerners in return. And Burlingame did something far more important. He called out the behavior of the southern leaders as they worked to attack the principles that supported “the very existence of the Government itself.”

“[T]he sons of Massachusetts are educated at the knees of their mothers, in the doctrines of peace and good will, and God knows, they desire to cultivate those feelings—feelings of social kindness, and public kindness,” Burlingame said. But he warned his southern colleagues that northerners were excellent soldiers and that “if we are pushed too long and too far,” northerners would fight to defend their lives, their principles, and their country.

Burlingame provoked Brooks, and he, temperamentally unable to resist any slight, challenged Burlingame to a duel. Brooks assumed all Yankees were cowards and figured that Burlingame would decline in embarrassment. But Burlingame accepted with enthusiasm, choosing rifles as the dueling weapons. Burlingame was an expert marksman.

Burlingame also chose to duel in Canada, giving Brooks the opportunity to back out on the grounds that he felt unsafe traveling through the North after his beating of Sumner made him a hated man. The negotiations for the duel went on for months, and the duel never took place. Burlingame had turned Brooks, known as “Bully” Brooks, into a figure of ridicule, revealing that when he faced an equal opponent, his bravado was bluster.

Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by standing up to them and vowing that the North would fight for democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call and, in so doing, reshaped politics.

The ‘Iron Mountain’ hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today’s conspiracy theories

We live in a ­blizzard of fake news, ­disinformation and ­conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed ­exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.

In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange ­document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “­special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.

This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.

In a political ­climate roiled by conspiracy ­theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the ­consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true.

March 13, 2025

Government funding is set to run out at the end of the day Friday — in less than 48 hours — and lawmakers have yet to strike a deal to avert a government shutdown.

The Republican-led House passed a continuing resolution Tuesday that would extend government funding through September, but Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Wednesday that his caucus planned to block the measure. Because of the filibuster rule, the bill needs 60 votes to advance in the Senate, requiring support from at least seven Democrats.

Many Democrats oppose the plan because it lacks any provisions reining in President Trump and Elon Musk from their spree of dismantling government agencies; Schumer’s announcement signals that his party is willing to risk a government shutdown to wage this fight.

But could the chaos of a shutdown actually empower Trump and Musk to reshape the government further?

I’ve put that question to a range of budget experts and shutdown veterans in the past few days, and Democratic lawmakers might want to consider their answers before pulling the trigger. Historically, the executive branch has been able to decide for itself what stays open and what doesn’t during a shutdown; Democrats, I was told, would be left with few options to challenge Trump’s determinations.

The first thing to know about shutdown law is there isn’t very much of it. The main legal provisions here are the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution, which says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” and the Antideficiency Act (ADA) of 1870, which similarly prohibits officials from spending “any sum in excess of appropriations made by Congress.”

But neither of those provisions lay out exactly what should happen when appropriations lapse — which might by why, for most of U.S. history, whenever Congress failed to pass appropriations laws, agencies remained open, continuing to operate despite their lack of funding. It wasn’t until the Carter era that Rep. Gladys Spellman (D-MD) dug up the long-forgotten ADA and began arguing that the law required agencies to shut down during gaps in appropriations.

The idea was so unheard-of that when Spellman made her case to the General Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ in-house auditor, the agency disagreed with her. But Spellman’s next correspondent, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, took her side. It is only because of a subsequent memo Civiletti wrote in April 1980 that government shutdowns came into existence.

“I think the reaction in the office was pretty much, ‘Huh, we never thought about this before,’” Peter Shane, an NYU professor who helped draft the Civiletti memo as a young DOJ employee, told me. But “once we started focusing on it,” Shane added, it seemed to have only “one right answer”: if Congress failed to pass a funding bill, agencies would have to cease their operations.

The Carter White House pushed back against Civiletti’s new interpretation, Shane recounted, leading to a follow-up memo in January 1981, clarifying that government operations involving the “safety of human life or the protection of property” could continue without appropriations.1 That’s still how funding gaps are handled today; those exceptions are what allow people like TSA agents and members of the military — as well as all other employees deemed “essential” — to continue working during shutdowns.

But the exceptions are ambiguous; in shutdowns past, the executive branch has been allowed to fill in the blanks as it sees fit, which would (at least temporarily) give Trump considerable discretion over the size of government.

Each agency sets their own plan for how many people to send home (or “furlough”) during a shutdown; the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), currently led by a group of close Trump allies, oversees the process. “The general principle is, whatever the president and his agents decide is essential…they’re going to go ahead and do it,” said Roy Meyers, a retired political science professor who has written about the history of shutdowns.

John Koskinen, who served as the OMB’s “shutdown czar” during the first extended lapse (under the Clinton administration), told me that the preparations mostly involved discussions within the executive branch, especially at OMB and the Justice Department.

“We were very clear that we did not want people cutting corners,” Koskinen said, but other presidents haven’t been as fastidious. (Koskinen told me that he left a binder of precedents behind to guide future shutdowns, but by the time he returned to government during the Obama era, it was nowhere to be found.)

Shutdowns leave a lot of room for “creative lawyering,” Georgetown Law professor Eloise Pasachoff, an appropriations expert, told me. And if you’re wondering whether Trump might try to push the boundaries, there isn’t any need to speculate: he already did so in his first term, repeatedly.

In Clinton- and Obama-era shutdowns, national parks were closed, sparking public outcry. But during the 35-day shutdown between December 2018 and January 2019 — the longest in U.S. history — the Trump administration kept the parks open, even going so far as to dip into a different pot of money to fund the decision. Similarly, most Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees were furloughed during previous shutdowns; in the middle of the 2018-19 gap, Trump officials decided to bring back 16,000 IRS workers so tax refunds could continue to be processed.

Overall, the GAO — now charged with tracking ADA violations — accused the Trump administration of breaking the law in at least eight different ways during the shutdown. Trump officials didn’t seem too bothered. Under the ADA, agencies are required to tell Congress when the GAO has accused them of flouting the statute. But OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta told agencies they didn’t have to do so.

“When an agency of the Legislative Branch interprets a law differently than the Executive Branch, the Executive Branch is not bound by its views,” Paoletta wrote. “ADA reporting requirements should reflect this principle.” Paoletta has now resumed his role in the current Trump administration.

The first Trump team also expanded the definition of “essential” in ways that helped its allies. The mortgage industry successfully lobbied the Trump administration to restart a key program in the middle of the shutdown (“Could you make these guys essential?” one executive asked). Oil and gas drilling permits, which stopped during previous shutdowns, were allowed to continue.

Several presidents have expanded the number of workers deemed essential, but none as aggressively as Trump. “The OMB during the Trump administration allowed agencies to, in effect, ignore the Civiletti memo,” Meyers told me. Then-acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has recounted that when he told the president about the national parks decision — which the GAO later deemed illegal — Trump responded: “Look, this shutdown has been going on for quite a while. Why didn’t you do this sooner?”

“If you need to do something that makes sense, you should just do it,” Trump told Bernhardt.

And that was when Trump was surrounded by more guardrails. It is easy to imagine his second administration taking even further steps. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, for example, announced plans yesterday to begin aggressively rolling back Biden-era regulations, but under the agency’s current protocols, regulatory activities largely stop during a shutdown.

The exact words of the ADA prohibits employees from working without funding “except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.” Under Trump’s energy emergency, could such deregulation be reinterpreted to fit that bill? (Continuation of regulatory activity was one area that the GAO dinged Trump 1 for.)

During the 2018-9 shutdown, immigration court hearings continued for detained immigrants, but not for non-detainees; that policy caused as many as 94,000 hearings to be canceled. Such hearings are a prerequisite for deportations; Trump has declared a border emergency as well, which could be invoked to ensure that his deportation numbers (already falling behind) don’t further lag due to the budget stalemate.

Then, of course, there’s Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which would unlikely be considered “essential” under current guidelines. But, as with most things in a shutdown, that protocol could easily be changed by executive decree. “Trump could say it’s a national emergency that we shrink the administrative state, and therefore it’s an essential function that DOGE be able to continue to order layoffs and cut off contracts,” Shane said. (“That would be nonsense,” he made clear, while adding “there is no norm-breaking undertaking by this administration that would any longer shock me.”)

“I’m struggling to think of something that Trump has ordered that he would not deem essential in the colloquial sense,” Shane told me. “I mean, if you start from the proposition, ‘Hey, I only order people to do essential things,’ then the scope of what could be described as ‘essential,’ becomes quite expansive.”

In addition to the “emergency” language, the GAO has also acknowledged the executive’s ability during a shutdown to carry out functions relating to the president’s “core constitutional powers” — another ambiguous exception that seems ripe for potential abuse.

If DOGE — and other Trump underlings suddenly deemed “essential” — were at work, but many career government officials are not, it could also potentially make it easier for Musk’s subordinates to access information systems at some agencies. Such access has caused clashes with career staff, but if those officials are on furlough, DOGE might enjoy a freer rein.

Speaking of DOGE, some Democratic lawmakers have raised the opposite concern: whether Trump could furlough more employees than normal during a shutdown, perhaps even viewing it as an opportunity to send them home for good.

Several of the experts I spoke to were dubious that the shutdown would allow Musk to fire any more people than he already is, if only because DOGE is already pushing so many boundaries. “They’re already illegally firing people,” Josh Chavetz, author of “Congress’ Constitution,” a book on the separation of powers, told me. “So I’m not sure that the possibility of a shutdown gives them anything they’re not currently using.”

At least one Trump ally, however, feels otherwise. In a 2023 essay published by the conservative Claremont Institute, a former Trump administration official — only identified pseudonymously, as “Lancelot A. Lamar” — discussed how to “transform shutdowns from the bureaucracy’s shield into the president’s sword.”

Lamar advocated for “America First agency heads,” along with OMB, to control the furlough process “politically,” suspending all programs except for those “the administration wishes to continue.” Lamar also pointed to the Reduction In Force (RIF) process, which the Trump administration has already begun using to lay off employees. Under RIF regulations, agencies are required to part ways with employees if they’ve been furloughed for more than 30 days, which could supercharge the layoff process.

The longtime stance of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been that furloughs during a shutdown don’t count for the purposes of that statute, but Lamar urged the agency to “revisit its current guidance” to end that “extralegal distinction.” This version of the RIF process is faster than the one the Trump team is currently using, but still requires 90 days to implement (a 30-day furlough, plus a 60-day notification period).

For that reason, Lamar urged a future Republican administration to try to continue a shutdown “at least through day 91 when hundreds of thousands of feds would be laid off, reshaping the bureaucracy according to the administration’s views of what is essential.” Employees facing RIF layoffs can still appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), but the MSPB ceased all operations during the 2018-19 shutdown, which would certainly slow that process.

Contrary to the Trump administration’s public position, according to Wired, Musk has told associates that he wants a government shutdown; the 90-day RIF process was cited in the article.

Trump and Musk have also placed allied figures at all the agencies needed to adjust operations in a shutdown: the acting head of OPM has been helping implement DOGE cuts. Russell Vought, the director of the OMB, has previously advocated for a “radical constitutionalism” in which the president seizes more power over spending. (Vought was also the OMB chief who told agencies to ignore the GAO after being reprimanded during Trump’s last shutdown.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which plays a key role in offering legal advice during shutdowns, is currently led by Ron DeSantis’ former solicitor general. At the same time, Trump has fired many of the watchdogs who might stand in his way.

Even if the shutdown doesn’t drag on long enough to use the RIF process — though it should be noted that Trump threatened to extend the 2018-19 shutdown for “years” — some lawmakers and experts have speculated that Trump could attempt to simply not ask back non-essential workers who are furloughed.

“You have a Congress which right now is very unwilling to fight by oversight to save programs, even programs that used to be funded and have a base of support,” said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and former congressional lawyer. “So if there’s a shutdown, and personnel are let go…and then the shutdown ends, but the administration doesn’t restart up an agency, and the congressional committees just look on benignly, then they let the program go.”

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) recently raised the same concern to reporters: “Who knows what he’s going to want to open back up? That is a huge risk. Maybe they decide that entire government agencies don’t need to exist anymore.”

If Trump does decide to push the boundaries of what a shutdown looks like, it might be difficult to stop him, especially because past shutdowns have been so driven by the White House.

The Republican-led Congress is unlikely to pass any laws hemming him in. Then there’s the GAO, which is empowered to track ADA violations but lacks much enforcement power. “The GAO?” Tiefer laughed, imagining the possibility of the watchdog agency standing in Trump’s way. “Forget it.”

Of course, there’s also the judiciary, but if Trump tries to expand the definition of “essential” — as he did during his first term — in order to keep more federal employees at work in ways that serve his ideological agenda, Democrats might have a tough time using the courts to stop him.

Anyone who brings a lawsuit in the U.S. must show that they have standing, which requires proving that they’ve been injured by the action that they’re challenging. While it’s easy to imagine people who might be injured by too much of the government shutting down, it’s harder to think of who might be hurt by Trump ordering government operations to continue on like normal.

Federal employees, who go unpaid when they work during a shutdown, might be one group. But when some tried to sue after being made to work during the 2018-19 shutdown, none were successful. The cases also took years to litigate, making them an imperfect remedy to begin with: one dispute wasn’t resolved until 2020; another until 2022.

In general, courts are often reticent to intervene in these sorts of disputes: “They’re going to want to stay out of it,” Chafetz told me. Partially for that reason, what exactly counts as “essential” has never been legally tested.

Still, attempting to operate the government beyond the narrow confines of the ADA wouldn’t be without legal risk: under the statute, officials can be fined $5,000 or sent to prison for two years if they work without funding on projects beyond the “safety of human life” or “protection of property” exceptions.

“I don’t know what OMB and/or the Justice Department would actually be willing to approve,” said Zachary Price, a law professor at the University of California San Francisco. “And then beyond that, it’s sort of a question of what agencies and employees do. They have some pretty specific personal risk associated with violating this law. So it people in a really tough position, if the executive branch — the people they’re supposed to count on for sound guidance — is telling them something’s OK when it’s objectively not OK.”

“I think that does sometimes create some constraints within the executive branch,” Price added. “People aren’t willing to spend money unlawfully because they’re personally on the hook under the Antideficiency Act.”

Still, no one has ever been prosecuted under the ADA, and it’s not as though Attorney General Pam Bondi would go through with charging these officials. They could still face liability from a future Democratic administration, Price noted, although he also cautioned that presidents rarely pursue prosecutions (even of the opposite party) that have the effect of limiting executive power. (The pardon power is, of course, also on the table.)

The most dramatic option available to the Trump administration would be for Bondi to rescind the Civiletti memo altogether, returning the government to its pre-1980 interpretation of the ADA: that it does not require shutdowns.

On its face, there’s nothing stopping Bondi from doing so: what’s done by the executive branch can be undone by it as well. “There’s no legal barrier to any attorney general revisiting a prior attorney general’s opinion and revising it in light of what they understand the law to be,” Shane said.

At that point, the only backstop would be the courts — although, again, the question of standing might pose an issue — ruling that the ADA does, in fact, require a shutdown, a question they have never weighed in on. (“Don’t give her any ideas,” Tiefer groaned when I asked about the possibility of Bondi releasing her own memo.)

Moving to end the shutdown unilaterally could serve the political ends of the Trump administration, as well as the president’s self-image as a powerful national savior. “You can imagine him saying, ‘Congress has failed, Congress can’t help you. It’s up to me to save everyone,’” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) recently told reporters. The Democrats say I’m trying to close the government, but they’re the ones who shut it down, he could say. And I’m the one who reopened it for you.

It’s unlikely, though, keeping the government open would serve Trump’s ideological agenda. (A future Democratic administration might feel differently.) Still, the hypothetical underlines how little case law exists in this area, both because shutdowns have been relatively brief and rare and because Congress and the courts have been content to let the executive branch craft the terms when they emerge. (After all, shutdowns are the executive branch’s creation.)

Instead of repealing Civiletto’s memo entirely, most of the experts I consulted found it more likely that Trump might use the leeway available to him to simultaneously engineer a shutdown more and less aggressive than those in the past, depending on the agency. “I think both of these directions are possible,” Pasachoff told me: Trump moving to more fully shut down agencies he dislikes, while claiming an emergency need to keep open those he does.

The most aggressive (and legally dubious) action Trump could take in this area would be moving to actually access the money sitting in the Treasury during a shutdown: the Justice Department, since Civiletti, has interpreted the ADA to mean the government can make people work during a shutdown, but can’t pay them (or make other expenditures). In a limited way in his first term, Trump experimented with moving money around during a shutdown, in the national parks example.

“I think he views his powers as limitless in a shutdown situation,” Tiefer said. “And so, yes, he would move money around, so that he could increase [immigration] holding facilities. He’s already said that there’s an emergency, so this would just be one more use of the emergency status. And who is there to stop him if he turns to Russell Vought and says, ‘Would you move money from the Department of Education to ICE?’ Vought’s not going to say no. And Pam Bondi is not going to say no.”

“The House GOP’s CR gives Trump & Musk a blank check to steal YOUR taxpayer dollars,” Senate Appropriations Committee vice chair Patty Murray (D-MA) wrote on X recently. “I won’t vote to help two billionaires pick winners & losers.”

But it’s possible that a Trump-led shutdown — following precedents his aides laid carefully during his first term — could be the ultimate “winners and losers” scenario, possibly by manipulating funding or more simply by keeping open certain agencies at the same time as he closes others.

Shutdowns are often treated as a political sideshow, and in many ways, they are. But they also speak poignantly to two highly charged national conversations underway right now.

First, at a time when Washington is hotly debating the size of our bureaucracy, shutdowns offer us an X-ray of which parts of the government we truly cannot do without — or at least which parts the regime at any given time believes so. A shutdown strips the U.S. government down to its parts, forcing officials to start from zero and only add back in what is “essential”: exactly what Musk has advocated on more than one occasion.

Last month’s OPM guidance on the RIF layoffs told agencies to use their shutdown plans as a benchmark, focusing on letting go employees whose operations aren’t considered essential when appropriations lapse. In doing so, the Trump administration explicitly pegged its broader vision to the type of government that emerges in a shutdown, attempting to bring the temporary shutdown definition of “essential” into force more permanently.

Second, shutdowns are nothing if not a high separation-of-powers clash, as Congress invokes its power of the purse to withhold funding from the president. What would it mean to have one now, as the push-and-pull between the legislative and the executive branches — especially in areas of spending — is being tested in ways it rarely has been?

Combining these two dynamics could lead to a combustible, and unpredictable, dispute — but it is one, unlike some other appropriations-focused clashes, in which the executive branch might boast the upper hand. In some ways, a shutdown is a form of Congress standing up to the executive, denying him money. But it can also be seen as lawmakers being forced, by their own gridlock, to temporarily cede pecuniary decisions to the White House, which — because of the post-Civiletti precedents — generally takes the lead in deciding how the government is structured during an appropriations lapse, with little consultation from the other branches.

“There’s a sense in which it sort of throws the ball into the president’s court,” said Chafetz. “A shutdown pumps up the notion that we’re in an emergency and therefore that the president’s executive powers are expanded to deal with the emergency,” Tiefer told me, adding: “He holds a lot of cards” during a shutdown.

All of this is compounded by the fact that there is such a limited legal framework to deal with shutdowns (and almost all of it that does exist was drafted by the executive).

“For what we might call the ‘Civil Rights Constitution,’ there’s a lot of case law,” Tiefer said. “A lot happens in the courts concerning the first ten amendments, the 14th amendment. But the ‘Fiscal Constitution’ goes into parts of Article I and Article II that often there isn’t much case law, there isn’t much litigation. And so some of the fabric that creates stability which you get for those other things, you don’t get for this.”

In other words, if you thought the second Trump administration has been chaotic so far: just wait until it’s put in charge of presiding over a shutdown.

1.By this point, tragically, Spellman had suffered a heart attack and was in a coma, as she would remain for the next eight years of her life. She is the only House member in history whose seat has been declared vacant by the chamber for medical reasons.

"Give us back the Statue of Liberty", centre-left politician Raphael Glucksmann said at a convention of his Place Publique centre-left movement.

"We're going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: 'Give us back the Statue of Liberty,'" he told cheering supporters.

"'We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home,'" he added.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump reached back to 1798 for authority to expel five people he claims are members of a Venezuelan gang. Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as the legal basis for the expulsion. The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws from 1798 that make up the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts.

Federalists in Congress passed the laws during what is known as the “Quasi-War” with France during the French Revolution, when it appeared that members of their political opposition in the U.S. were working to destabilize the U.S. government’s foreign policy of neutrality and overthrow the government so it would side with France in its struggles with Spain and Great Britain.

Their fears were not unfounded. In 1793, the year after French citizens overthrew the French monarchy, Edmond Charles Genêt arrived in the United States to serve as the French minister to the U.S. Immediately, Citizen Genêt ignored U.S. neutrality and began outfitting privateers to prey on British shipping. When the government told him to stop, he threatened to appeal to the American people. More radical French officials replaced Genêt in 1794, although he stayed in the U.S. out of concern for his safety under the new regime in France.

But his threat to appeal to Americans highlighted the growing tension between the party of George Washington and John Adams—the Federalists—and the party of Thomas Jefferson: the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonian Republicans). Democratic-Republicans thought that the Federalists were moving toward monarchy, and they worked to undermine that shift by building ties with the French government to put members of their own party into office. In 1798 a private citizen, George Logan, traveled to France to negotiate with the government for policies that would strengthen the hands of the Democratic-Republicans at home.

It’s from Logan’s attempt that we got the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from “directly or indirectly” working with a foreign government to influence either the foreign government or the U.S. government. This is one of the laws Trump’s national security advisor Mike Flynn likely ran afoul of after the 2016 election when, as a private citizen, he talked to Russian operatives about Trump’s plans to change U.S. foreign policy once he was in office.

In addition to the Logan Act, Federalists in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Alien Enemies Act. That law, which applies during wartime or when a foreign government threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” permits the president to authorize the arrest, imprisonment, or deportation of people older than 14 who come from a foreign enemy country. President James Madison used the law to arrest British nationals during the War of 1812, President Woodrow Wilson invoked it against Germans during World War I, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it against Japanese, Italian, and German noncitizens.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would use the Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members, and in an executive order signed Friday night but released yesterday morning after news of it leaked, Trump claimed that thousands of members of the Tren de Aragua gang have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” In connection with the Venezuelan government, he said, the gang has made incursions into the U.S. with the goal of “destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

Marc Caputo of Axios reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem orchestrated the weekend’s events. Caputo explained that after news of the executive order leaked, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights posted on social media at 2:31 p.m. that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL I[mmigration and] C[ustoms] E[nforcement] flights” were leaving Texas on a flight path to El Salvador.

The administration was deporting more than 200 men it claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and sending them to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele had agreed to accept prisoners from the U.S. for “a very low fee.” Tim Sullivan and Elliot Spagat of the Associated Press report that the administration agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 men for a year.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward promptly filed a lawsuit warning that Trump would be using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans in the country as gang members, regardless of whether there was any evidence of their gang membership and regardless of whether Venezuela is truly trying to invade the United States. The suit asked a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the deportation of five Venezuelans in federal custody who believed they were about to be deported. At least one of the men said he wasn’t a member of the gang.

Judge James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, issued a temporary restraining order stopping the government from deporting the five men. The administration promptly appealed, and the ACLU asked the judge to expand the order to cover all migrants who could fall under Trump’s executive order.

Ryan Goodman of Just Security put together the timeline of what came next. At 5:00 last night, Judge Boasberg asked whether deportations would happen in the next 24–48 hours. The government’s attorney said he didn’t know; the ACLU attorney said the government was moving rapidly. Before 5:22, Boasberg ordered a break so the government attorney could obtain official information before the hearing resumed at 6:00.

At 5:45, Goodman reports, another flight took off.

Before 6:52, Judge Boasberg agreed with the ACLU that the terms of the Alien Enemies Act apply only to “enemy nations,” and blocked deportations under it. Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Gary Grumbach of NBC News reported that the judge ordered the administration to return the planes in flight to the United States. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off, or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States,” the judge said. “Those people need to be returned to the United States.”

Caputo reports that White House officials discussed whether to order the planes, which were then off the Yucatan Peninsula, to turn around but chose not to.

At 8:02, Goodman reports, more than an hour past the judge’s order to recall the planes, a flight arrived in El Salvador.

Last night, El Salvador’s president reposted an article explaining that a federal judge had ordered the planes to return to the U.S., adding the comment: “Oopsie… Too late,” with a laughing emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted it.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Caputo, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that's a fight we are more than happy to take.” But while the administration would like to make this crisis about the alleged behavior of the men they deported, it is really about the rule of law in the United States.

As law professor Steve Vladeck explains, the administration is asserting that Trump himself can determine that the country is at war although it obviously isn’t, an assertion that Tim Balk of the New York Times notes would give Trump the power to arrest, detain, and deport all migrants over the age of 14 without due process, as he determined who is a gang member without due process. We have no evidence that the men deported were gang members, and now they have vanished.

In addition, the administration appears to have violated the orders of the court. As legal analyst Harry Litman wrote: “The table is set for the most direct showdown of Trump and the courts to date. Administration admits today that 100s of supposed gang members were deported w/ no process. chief judge of district court Jeb Boasberg had ordered them not to do it and to return any planes that had been sent.”

Legal commentator Joyce White Vance added that although there will be fights over who did what, when, the case will be headed to the Supreme Court, where Trump will hope for a decision “that says he can do these deportations regardless of other legal issues, because he is the president, and the president has the power to do whatever he deems necessary under Article II of the Constitution.” She adds:” If presidents can do whatever they want, including putting people on a plane and sending them to prisons in a foreign country with no due process whatsoever, then really, who are we?”

Trump’s erosion of the rule of law has been speeding up since he took office. On March 6 he began to target lawyers when he signed an executive order designed to put the Perkins Coie law firm, which often represents Democratic politicians and organizations, out of business. After a judge blocked his order harassing Perkins Coie, Trump followed it with attacks on the Paul, Weiss law firm, and then on Covington.

On Friday, Trump appeared at the Department of Justice, the arm of government charged with protecting the equal protection of the laws, where he said those who challenge his actions are “horrible people. They are scum.” The president of the United States identified lawyers he dislikes by name from the Department of Justice, an astonishing attempt to undermine the rule of law by endangering particular individuals who would protect it.

“We are inevitably headed,” Vance wrote, “to a confrontation between a president who has rejected the rule of law and a judge sworn to enforce it. We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment for democracy.”

In Common Sense, when he made the argument against monarchy that would drive the colonists to create their own new form of government, Thomas Paine warned his neighbors that without the rule of law, the country belongs to a king. He urged them to turn away from a world that gave one man such absolute power. “[S]o far as we approve of monarchy,” he wrote, “in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club held its championship today. He posted tonight that he is proud to have won it again this year.

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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Caputo, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that's a fight we are more than happy to take.” …

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From 1942 to 1945, the Code Talkers were key to every major operation of the Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater. The Code Talkers were Indigenous Americans who used codes based in their native languages to transmit messages that the Axis Powers never cracked. The Army recognized the ability of tribal members to send coded language in World War I and realized the codes could not be easily interpreted in part because many Indigenous languages had never been written down.

The Army expanded the use of Code Talkers in World War II, using members of 34 different tribes in the program. Indigenous Americans always enlisted in the military in higher proportions than any other demographic group—in World War II, more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between 19 and 50 joined the service—and the participation of the Code Talkers was key to the invasion of Iwo Jima, for example, when they sent more than 800 messages without error.

“Were it not for the Navajos,” Major Howard Connor said, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

Today, Erin Alberty of Axios reported that at least ten articles about the Code Talkers have disappeared from U.S. military websites. Broken URLs are now labeled “DEI,” an abbreviation for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

Axios found that web pages associated with the Department of Defense have also put DEI labels on now-missing pages that honored prominent Black veterans. Similarly missing is information about women who served in the military, including the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II. A profile of Army Major General Charles Rogers, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, was similarly changed, but the Defense Department replaced the missing page and removed “dei” from the URL today after a public outcry.

Two days ago, media outlets noted that the Arlington National Cemetery website had deleted content about Black, female, and Hispanic veterans.

The erasure of Indigenous, Black, Hispanic, and female veterans from our military history is an attempt to elevate white men as the sole actors in our history. It is also an attempt to erase a vision of a nation in which Americans of all backgrounds come together to work—and fight—for the common good.

After World War II, Americans came together in a similar spirit to create a government that works for all of us. It is that government—and the worldview it advances—that the Trump administration is currently dismantling.

The most obvious attack on that government is the attempt to undermine Social Security, a system by which Congress in 1935 pulled Americans together to support the nation’s most vulnerable. President Donald Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk have been asserting, falsely, that Social Security is mired in fraud and corruption.

Today, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that an internal memo from the Social Security Administration, written by acting deputy commissioner Doris Diaz, called for requiring beneficiaries to visit a field office to provide identification if they cannot access the internet to complete verification there. Diaz estimated that implementing this policy would require the administration to receive 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors a week.

But Social Security Administration offices no longer accept walk-ins and the current wait time for a visit already averages more a month, while this change would create a 14% increase in visits. The administration is currently closing Social Security offices. Diaz predicted “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls” that would create increased “challenges for vulnerable populations.” She also predicted “legal challenges and congressional scrutiny.”

In the news over the weekend has been the story of 82-year-old Ned Johnson of Seattle, Washington, who lost his Social Security benefits after he was mistakenly declared dead. Upon that declaration, the government clawed back $5,201 from Johnson’s bank account, canceled his Medicare coverage, and warned credit agencies that he was “deceased, do not issue credit.” While Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” said the error had “zero connection” to its work, it is at least an unfortunate coincidence that Musk has repeatedly insisted that dead people are collecting benefits.

Various recent reports show the cost of the destruction of the government that worked for everyone. Kate Knibbs of Wired reported today that cuts at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have decimated the teams that inspect plant and food imports, creating risks from invasive pests and leaving food to rot as it waits for inspection.

Today, Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim, and Julie Tate of the New York Times reported that cuts to the top secret National Nuclear Security Administration have meant the loss of critical employees—from scientists and engineers through accountants and lawyers—at the agency that manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads. The agency was already shorthanded as it worked to modernize the arsenal and was hiring to handle the additional workload. Now it appears to have lost many of its leaders, who were most likely to be able to land top jobs in the private sector.

Republicans convinced Americans to vote to undermine a government that enables all of us to look out for each other by pushing a narrative that says such a government is dangerous because it gives power to undesirables and lets crime run rampant in the U.S. On Friday, Musk reposted an outrageous tweet saying that dictators “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”

The idea that a government that works for everyone is dangerous is at the heart of the administration’s rhetoric about the men it has deported to El Salvador without the due process of law. Although we have no idea who those men are, the administration insists they are violent criminals and that anyone trying to protect the rule of law is somehow siding with rapists and murderers. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a statement saying that the judge insisting on the rule of law was supporting “terrorists over the safety of Americans.”

In place of a world in which the government works for all Americans, President Donald Trump and his supporters are imposing authoritarianism. This morning, Trump declared the presidential pardons issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” and went on to say that members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol “should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level.” The Constitution does not have any provision to undo a presidential pardon, and Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted that “implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be.”

After White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back Trump’s insistence that Biden’s pardons were invalid by saying that Trump was just suggesting that Biden was mentally incompetent when he signed the pardons, Trump pulled the Secret Service protection from Biden’s children Hunter and Ashley, apparently to demonstrate that he could.

The rejection of a government that works for all Americans in order to concentrate power in the executive branch appears to serve individuals like Musk, rather than the American people. Isaac Stanley-Becker reported in The Atlantic on March 9 that although the government awarded Verizon a $2.4 billion contract to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration’s communications network, Musk has instructed his SpaceX company to install its equipment in that network. Those installations seem designed to make the U.S. air traffic control system dependent on SpaceX, whose equipment, Stanley-Becker notes, “has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.”

When Evan Feinman, who directed the $42.5 billion rural broadband program, left his position on Friday, he wrote an email to his former colleagues warning that there would be pressure to turn to SpaceX’s Starlink for internet connection in rural areas. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he wrote.

Cuts to the traditional U.S. government also appear to serve Russia. Over the weekend, the administration killed the Voice of America media system that has spread independent democratic journalism across the world for 83 years. About 360 million people listened to its broadcasts. The system was a thorn in the side first of the Soviet Union and now of Russia and China. Now it is silent, signaling the end of U.S. soft power that spread democratic values. “The world’s autocrats are doing somersaults,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote.

And maybe those two things go hand in hand. Maggie Haberman, Kate Conger, Eileen Sullivan, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times reported today that Starlink has been installed across the White House campus. Officials say that Musk has “donated” the service, although because of security concerns, individuals typically cannot simply give technology to the government.

Waldo Jaquith, who worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama and who specializes in best practices for government procurement of custom software, posted on social media: “I'm the guy who used to oversee the federal government's agency IT telecommunications contracts. This is extremely bad. There is absolutely no need for this. Not only is it a huge security exposure, but the simplest explanation for this is that it is meant to be a security exposure.”

The test of whether Americans will accept the destruction of a government that works for the common good and its replacement with one that works for the president and his cronies might well come from the need to address disasters like the storm system that hit the Deep South and the Plains over the weekend. At least forty people died, including four in Oklahoma, three in Arkansas, six in Mississippi, three in Alabama, eight in Kansas, four in Texas, and at least twelve in Missouri. High winds, tornadoes, and fires did extraordinary damage across the region.

The destruction caused by a hurricane that flattened Galveston, Texas, in 1900 was a key factor in developing the modern idea of a nonpartisan government that could efficiently provide relief after a disaster and help in the process of rebuilding. As Alex Fitzpatrick of Axios reported last week, Trump has suggested “fundamentally overhauling or reforming” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or even getting rid of it entirely, turning emergency relief over to the states. A new analysis by the Carnegie Disaster Dollar Database shows that Republican-dominated states receive a lot of that assistance.

Sarah Labowitz, who led the study, told Fitzpatrick: “Up to now, when there is a disaster, the government responds. They clean up the debris, they rebuild the schools, they run shelters, they clean the drinking water. All of that is supported by a federal disaster relief ecosystem that spreads the risk around the country, spreads the costs around the country. And if we stop spreading the costs around the country, then it's going to fall on states, and it's going to fall on states really unevenly.”

Presidents usually do all they can to avoid recessions, so much so that they avoid even saying the word.

But President Trump and his advisers in recent weeks have offered a very different message. Yes, a recession is possible, they have said. Maybe one wouldn’t even be that bad.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has said Mr. Trump’s policies are “worth it” even if they cause a recession. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has said the economy may need a “detox period” after becoming dependent on government spending. And Mr. Trump has said there will be a “period of transition” as his policies take effect.

Such comments may partly reflect an effort to align political statements with economic reality. Mr. Trump promised to end inflation “starting on Day 1” and declared, in his inaugural address, that “the golden age of America begins right now.”

Instead, inflation has remained stubborn, and while Mr. Trump has been in office less than two months, economists warn that his tariffs are likely to make it worse. Measures of consumer and business confidence have plummeted and stock prices have tumbled, attributable in large part to Mr. Trump’s policies and the uncertainty they have caused.

“It’s the kind of language that you use when your policy isn’t going great and you can see that it’s actively harming people,” said Sean Vanatta, a financial historian at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

The Trump administration and its supporters argue that their goals go beyond political messaging. They say they are looking to reduce imports, bring back manufacturing jobs and “re-industrialize” the American economy. Even if doing so requires higher prices in the short run, they argue, American workers will win out in the end.

“The trade-off of short-term pain for long-term gain can be very real and an important thing to pursue,” said Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, a conservative research organization that has backed many of Mr. Trump’s economic policies. “It’s actually incredibly heartening to see that we might have some political leaders who are willing to speak honestly about that.”

But even Mr. Cass was critical of the administration’s on-again, off-again approach to tariffs, which he said risked undermining the policy’s effectiveness.

And while many economists are sympathetic to the idea that presidents must sometimes cause temporary hardship in the pursuit of longer-run goals, few are willing to defend the specific set of policies the Trump administration is adopting.

“The idea of short-term pain for long-term gain is not a crazy idea in and of itself,” said Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. But Mr. Trump’s trade policies, he said, are “short-term pain to get more long-term pain.”

Trade wars, tariffs and prices

One form of short-term pain that Mr. Trump and his aides have acknowledged is that tariffs will raise the price of imported goods. Mr. Bessent has framed that as a necessary if difficult step to wean the U.S. economy off cheap foreign goods, particularly from China.

“The American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles from China,” Mr. Bessent said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “It is more than that. And we are focused on affordability, but it’s mortgages, it’s cars, it’s real wage gains.”

Most economists, however, reject the idea that reducing imports will leave Americans better off overall. Competition from lower-cost producers overseas has hurt some U.S. industries, they acknowledge, but made Americans richer on average — lower prices are in effect a pay increase, leaving consumers with more money to spend on goods and services.

But even if the goal is to reduce imports, economists say broad-based tariffs like the ones Mr. Trump has threatened and imposed will be ineffective. That’s because the tariffs hit not just consumer goods but the parts and materials that U.S. manufacturers use to produce their products — making them more expensive for domestic and foreign consumers alike.

“If their goal is to re-industrialize, I think they’re going to learn that tariffs actually set them back on that,” said Kimberly Clausing, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who served in the Treasury Department during the Biden administration. “Making things in America is much harder when all the inputs are more expensive.”

Some economists in recent years have turned a more skeptical eye on their profession’s longstanding orthodoxy on free trade. David Autor, an M.I.T. economist, has done influential research finding that the flood of cheap goods from China beginning in 2000 led to the rapid destruction of U.S. manufacturing jobs, leaving many workers and communities worse off in the long-run — an episode that has become known as the “China shock.”

But tariffs today can’t reverse a shock that occurred decades ago, Mr. Autor said — and, in any case, there is little sense in trying to bring back the textile mills and mass-market-furniture factories that the China shock wiped out.

Instead, Mr. Autor said, policymakers should focus on preserving and strengthening the higher-value manufacturing industries that drive innovation. Tariffs can be part of that strategy, he said, but they should be focused on specific sectors and paired with subsidies to encourage investment. The Biden administration pursued that strategy with laws promoting investment in semiconductor manufacturing and green energy, but Mr. Trump has, so far, abandoned it.

“It cannot be just a tariff story,” Mr. Autor said. “There has to be investment.”

Deficits and spending

Economists are more sympathetic to another of Mr. Bessent’s arguments: that the economy has become too dependent on government spending.

Economists across the political spectrum agree that the government should not be running multitrillion-dollar deficits during a period of low unemployment, when tax revenues are ordinarily strong and government spending isn’t necessary to stimulate growth. Cutting deficits now might be difficult — requiring spending cuts and tax increases — but waiting until the deficit becomes a crisis would be much more so.

“The longer we wait, the more the pain is going to be,” said Alan J. Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent decades studying the federal budget.

The trouble, Mr. Auerbach and other economists say, is that nothing the Trump administration has proposed would make a meaningful dent in the deficit. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has slashed jobs and shuttered programs, but those efforts touch only a tiny fraction of the federal budget.

Congressional Republicans, in the budget framework they passed last month, proposed more substantial cuts by targeting a major program, Medicaid. But rather than pair those cuts with tax increases, the Republican plan would extend Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, ultimately resulting in a huge increase to the deficit.

Who bears the costs?

The 2017 tax cuts disproportionately benefited higher-income households, according to most independent analyses. Medicaid cuts would overwhelmingly hurt low- and moderate-income families, as would cuts to other government services. Tariffs likewise tend to be hardest on poorer households, which spend more of their income on food, clothes and other imported goods.

The short-term pain created by the administration’s policies, in other words, could fall hardest on low-income Americans — many of whom voted for Mr. Trump in hopes of improving their economic situation.

“It’s really hard to see how the Trump voters come out ahead,” Ms. Clausing, the former Treasury official, said. “Prices are going to be higher, disruptions are going to be higher and the safety net is going to get cut.”

Even some defenders of Mr. Trump’s policies, such as Mr. Cass, say cutting benefits to pay for tax cuts runs counter to the administration’s stated goal of restoring the middle class.

“The tax piece of this is definitely a confounding factor,” he said.

A recession, too, would be particularly hard on lower-wage and less educated workers, who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic, said Jessica Fulton, vice president of policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research organization focused on issues affecting Black Americans.

And even if a downturn is short-lived, the damage might not be. Economic research has shown that people who lose jobs in a recession, or who graduate into one, can suffer long-term career consequences.

“To talk about causing temporary harm ignores the fact that people will be feeling the results of decisions that this administration makes for years to come,” Ms. Fulton said.

Trump Says a Recession Might Be Worth the Cost. Economists Disagree.

President Trump and his advisers say his policies may cause short-term pain but will produce big gains over time. Many economists are skeptical of those arguments.