Furloughs, firings and blame dominate a shutdown fight with no clear offramp : NPR

Scott Detrow, host:

It’s Friday. The federal government is still closed, and at least, at least, there does not seem to be real progress towards a kind of agreement. In fact, President Trump boasts on social networks that the dead end gives him more power to reduce the federal government on the objections of the Democrats. What does it mean and what happens next? We will talk about it with the correspondent of the White House NPR, Franco Ordoñez and the main and corresponding political editor Domenico Montanaro. Hello to you two.

Franco Ordoñez, Byline: Hey, Scott.

Domenico Montanaro, Byline: Hey, delighted to be here.

Detrow: Franco, I want to start with you and this threat of layoffs. The White House threatened to pull definitively, not just leave, many federal workers. Usually people are on leave or called to work without salary. Why do we suddenly hear about layoffs?

Ordoñez: I mean, I think the situation as a whole is that it is something that the Republicans and especially the Maga des Républicains wing have been working for years. I mean, it comes down to Russ Vought. He is director of the management and budget office. And some of our listeners will remember him as one of the key architects of the controversial 2025 project. You know, he has long pleaded for a much more muscular omb and a much more muscular white house that acts really more in an activist way of reducing spending and revising the federal government.

And now that he is in power, you know, he really takes this to heart, and he has his fingers on some of the most controversial aspects or movements that this administration has taken in the first months, in particular by considerably reducing the federal bureaucracy, ending the hiring of diversity and retaining billions and billions of dollars in appropriate funds.

Montanaro: It’s really remarkable because during the campaign in 2024, so the candidate Trump was trying to distant …

Detow: Oh, yeah.

Montanaro: … of the 2025 project, which was this plan created for a second term Trump by the Conservative Heritage Foundation, and Vought was one of the main authors. And all we have seen now is that many people who helped write the 2025 project and who were part of them have just rolled directly in the Trump administration.

Detrow: Let’s talk about blame and messaging because it is always a large part of the closure. And generally one side is blamed more than the other, and this kind is a fairly clear indicator of how the stop will end, which will get what they want. Democrats saying that they refuse to support a financing bill without extending subsidies to the affordable care law, and the Republicans continue to degenerate their rhetoric – Domenico, what explains to you how the White House talks about all of this?

Montanaro: Look, the president has an intimidation chair. He is not afraid to use it. Democrats really don’t seem to understand what to strike him with. I mean, health care is a fairly intelligent place for Democrats, because the affordable care law now has a favorability rating of 64% with regard to the KFF monitoring survey. It’s quite high, not – certainly not where it was in 2010, when the Democrats lost a bunch of seats.

And look, it is absolutely true that if you do not extend subsidies, it will become much more expensive to buy health care for millions of people. Republicans have the impression of being able to say, this is not what is in everything that the Republicans have put in the bill and that the Democrats are simply trying to extract a negotiation around something that is not linked.

Detow: Franco, let’s talk specifically about the White House language here. The White House has the biggest pulpit, that’s for sure. Here, this morning, the press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, addressing Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition.

(Soundbit of archived NPR content)

Karoline Leavitt: They have chosen a partisan struggle for the financing of health care, which, by the way, is a fight and a discussion that is worth having, but we cannot have it at the ninth hour when the federal government firm.

Detow: So Franco, it’s on the one hand. Then, on the other hand, you have President Trump tweeting racist memes, videos generated by AI, mocking Democrats and really celebrating opportunities to punish Democrats and states controlled by Democrats. How does that leave space to have a serious conversation, as what the press secretary is talking about?

Ordoñez: Yes, I mean, I think there are real questions about the quantity of president who takes this seriously. I mean, look, this thing becomes viral on Tiktok. It becomes viral on Instagram. It’s everywhere. And I will just note that you do not see the Democrats as much on these platforms as much. So good or bad, whether it is a demonstration of seriousness – I think it’s a questionable question. But what I think you cannot debate is that he controls the story in this way.

Montanaro: Unity is really important in a closure, and at the moment, the Republicans – the republican base certainly has more unity than the Democrats. Our survey this week, the NPR / PBS survey with the Marist College, revealed that 77% of the Republicans support the Republicans in the Congress. Only 48% of Democrats support Democrats at Congress. There is therefore the potential here that the Democrats could fracture a little, that they are not certain of the strategy. The person who seems to direct this strategy – one of them, anyway – is Chuck Schumer, who is the Democratic leader of the Senate, and here he was talking about this strategy and what they are going to do during the morning Joe de MSNBC this week.

(Soundbit of the television show, “Morning Joe”)

Chuck Schumer: We are ready to sit down and negotiate a good deal to help the American people get out of the dilemma of health care. But in the meantime, we are going to fight everywhere – on television channels like yours, in social media, in stake, by protesting, in emails, in all ways.

Montanaro: The fact is that Schumer is not exactly the best messenger for Democrats. He is not someone, as Franco speaks, becoming viral on social networks for the right reasons and repel against Trump. Democrats are therefore really looking for – and have been looking for since Obama was out of the White House in 2016 – for whom can be their messenger, and the war of messages will be what ends up ending this closure.

Detrow: So, whatever the way to the way to follow at this stage?

Montanaro: Well, the Democrats start with a marginal advantage here. Our survey revealed that by a margin of 38 to 27% – that people would blame Republicans more than Democrats, but 31% of people are indecisive. So the messaging that takes place will be the key because 31% is who they target both sides to try to win. And we know that in 2019, when the longest closure in the story took place, Trump was much more blamed than it is blamed at the moment, and that’s what pushed him to the table, but it took a month.

Ordoñez: You know, I think that really a big question is, how long is it going? Because if it continues more time and Vought has the possibility of making many of these cuts, and these cuts begin to have an impact – whether it is the dismissal of federal workers, health care cuts – I think that real people will start to feel the effects, and I think you could see a difference.

Detow: Franco Ordoñez, Domenico Montanaro, thanks to both of you.

Montanaro: You are welcome.

Ordoñez: Thank you.

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