Coverage of a government shutdown typically focuses on counting days and political blame games. Politicians are described as being stuck in an “impasse” with party leaders attacking one another and workers and the economy facing uncertain “disruption” and “fallout.”
That’s been the media’s approach again this time, even as workers are screaming in every way they can that this isn’t your usual standoff.
While pundits tally days and trade soundbites, workers whose livelihoods hang in the balance—people like Palmer Heenan and Paul Osadebe, whistleblowers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development—have sounded the alarm with all the clarity the headlines lack.
In our conversation recently, they underscored that today’s crisis started long before the government shutdown three weeks ago — and it isn’t simply about budgets or bureaucrats, it’s about dismantling the public goods that millions depend on and the rights that generations have fought for, and implementing a radical blueprint that reactionaries have publicly laid out.
In a 2023 essay published by the conservative Claremont Institute, a former Trump administration official writing under the pseudonym “Lancelot A. Lamar” urged future Republican agency heads along with the OMB to suspend all programs they didn’t like, and maintain “tactical discipline" for as long as possible.
“There will be plenty of media sob stories and congressional fulmination, fed by the bureaucracy, about the suspension of ‘vital’ programs,” wrote Lamar. “These are attempts to gain concessions outside of formal negotiations, as well as tests of the administration’s unity and will.”
Lamar urged the future Republican administration that he and Russell Vought (now budget director) were planning for, to try to continue a shutdown “at least through day 91 when hundreds of thousands of feds could be laid off, reshaping the bureaucracy according to the administration’s views of what is essential.”
The law governing shutdowns is skimpy. The Appropriations Clause of the Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”. The Antideficiency Act (ADA) of 1870 prohibits officials from spending “any sum in excess of appropriations made by Congress.” But neither says what to do when appropriations run out. Lamar urged "America First" lawyers to fight over all of it.
The point is, the power struggles that animate this shutdown are meant to outlast it, leveraging legal ambiguities, executive fiat, and congressional paralysis to redefine “essential” as that which survives unchallenged.
As we enter week three, the administration has managed to find funds for the military and ICE. There’s still money to make mayhem from Chicago to Caracas.
As for the rest, as Lamar argued, if no one but federal workers notice the absence, the program never mattered.
That's why the media coverage counts. As Paul and Palmer and their allies at the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) remind us by risking their jobs to speak out, by marching, by organizing, and by refusing to shut up—it is not enough just to ask who wins or loses this week's fight. The battle for the purse strings—waged between Congress and the executive—forges new precedents every day, and the stakes—like the casualties—are invisible only if we choose not to look.
