Jackie Calmes: This is Trump's shutdown. But he's been dismantling the government all year

Of all the federal government shutdowns that I've covered over three decades, the current one, now in its third week, is the weirdest by far.

Most other times, by this point the battling sides — Democrats versus Republicans, White House versus Congress — have reached some split-the-baby resolution, pressured by an American public disgusted by shuttered federal offices, lapsed or shoestring services, threatened benefits and the general show of their representatives' political dysfunction.

But this time, the 21st shutdown in the last half-century, all sides have dug in. No serious negotiations are underway. Heck, the Republican House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, sent lawmakers home a month ago, to await Democrats' surrender. Yet Democrats, buoyed by polls showing more Americans blame Republicans for the standoff, show little sign of caving on their demand that President Trump and Republicans agree to extend Obamacare subsidies and restore deep Medicaid cuts as part of any bill funding the government.

This time, Republicans who normally would be cowed by the polls are more cowed by Trump and are taking their cues from him. And he seems to be delighting — along with his designated "Grim Reaper," budget director and "Project 2025" architect Russell Vought — in using the shutdown as an excuse to fire more federal workers and shutter more agencies, rather than seek to end the chaos. Trump appears to relish the prospect of breaking the modern record for the longest shutdown, five weeks, which he set in his first term when he unsuccessfully held out to get billions for a border wall that he'd said Mexico would pay for. He promised a new hit list by Friday — of "the most egregious, socialist, semi-communist, probably not full communist" programs that Democrats support. Huh?

As for the Democrats — the party that typically wants to make the government work for people — this time they argue that the government hasn't really been working since Republicans took control of the White House, Senate and House in January. So, they figure, let's have a real shutdown: to underscore for Americans the de facto government shutdown that Trump has been engineering from the time he took office, when he handed a scythe first to former first buddy Elon Musk and his DOGE kids and then to the gleefully villainous Vought.

And the Democrats are right, this time.

Trump has been dismantling many of the government's domestic programs for nine months, with an abandon that disregards federal laws and the Constitution's separation of powers, as numerous lower-court judges have found (only to be temporarily checked by the Trump-friendly Supreme Court). Even America's foreign rivals and enemies couldn't have conceived of a more shockingly self-defeating course than the one its commander in chief has his nation on — targeting education from pre-K through postgraduate studies, scientific and medical research, public health and general healthcare, clean energy, community development and so much more.

The president and his team boast of essentially closing down the U.S. Agency for International Development, formerly the world's largest conduit of foreign aid and American soft power, and the Education Department, just to name two doomed departments. Such closures should require acts of Congress — because Congress created the entities. But when you fire just about all the employees, what's left? No one should have been shocked in recent days at the news that the latest Trump-Vought cuts include wiping out federal special-education assistance. Community colleges have been especially hard hit.

Special ed and community colleges — the kind of semi-commie programs that only Democrats could love?

The Office of Personnel Management said in August that it expected about 300,000 federal workers to be gone by year's end from firings, resignations and retirements, or about 1 in 8 civilian workers — the largest single-year reduction since World War II. On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the exodus has contributed to "a historic wave of retirements and other departures" among those left to shoulder the added burdens. No worries: Trump's director of the Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor, told the Post that his staff works "more efficiently now at lower numbers."

But here's a personnel management agency employee's take from that Post report, which rings true across the government board: "No strategic direction, no strategic plan, statutorily required duties gone by the wayside, no backups for things people did when they left … budget questions that can't be answered, big holes in institutional knowledge, no ability to backfill priority positions."

As Trump whacks federal clean-energy investments and forfeits foreign markets for fossil-fuel alternatives, leaving the U.S. to "drill, baby, drill," countries including China and India are leading the way on solar, wind, battery and other energy developments as the cheapest sources for power — contrary to Trump's fact-free complaints about renewable energy's high costs. This month, his administration axed nearly $8 billion in new-technology projects, saying they only "fuel the Left's climate agenda."

Yet even Trump & Co. have had to tacitly admit, repeatedly, they've gone too far. They've called back some targeted federal employees or sought new hires for the Internal Revenue Service, the National Weather Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. At the CDC, about 1,300 layoffs Friday were rescinded by late Saturday because they included needed monitors of measles and Ebola, yet workers responsible for biodefense, pandemics and mental health didn't survive. This after three senior CDC leaders resigned in August to protest the politicization of science at the centers. And remember back in February, when DOGE's shock-and-awe offensive hit the National Nuclear Security Administration that oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal? Oops.

Democrats are right to demand that Republicans support continued healthcare subsidies before Democrats vote to reopen the government. But the ongoing shutdown is at least as valuable for drawing Americans' attention to the de facto Trump shutdown that predates it, and that unfortunately will outlast it. The actual shutdown will end somehow, eventually. But the fight must continue.

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