I remember exactly where I was during the last government shutdown.

I wasn’t running around Capitol Hill asking members of Congress for updates, as was my usual routine. Instead, I had locked myself in a room at my parents’ house in California over Christmas break, where, sitting cross-legged on a bed, I spent hours scanning government websites for any hints of frozen or deleted pages.

That shutdown was the longest in United States history, stretching from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019. It was also the last time we had a government shutdown—and, worth mentioning, it was also under President Donald Trump.

During a period of time that’s usually a reliably slow news week—given that Congress is typically out of session between Christmas and the New Year—I was juggling present-wrapping with banging out scoops on trash piling up at national parks and thousands of employees facing the holiday season with no paychecks. 

National parks were left open without staff during that 35-day shutdown, which led to illegal offroading that, in one instance, downed a protected Joshua Tree. The Interior Department started pulling from its park entrance fees to pay furloughed staff to come back, with questionable legality. The shutdown ultimately lost national parks $11 million in revenues. Meanwhile, the government shuttered a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration webpage for climate data, and the Interior stopped taking public records requests. That happened a week after the department had quietly established a new policy–which I broke–that would make it harder for reporters to get records back overall. 

In last week’s newsletter, I said that shutdowns offer a convenient time to remove inconvenient metrics. But it’s looking like this time around, the Trump administration isn’t using the shutdown as cover to shroud long-desired changes—it’s using it as ammunition to brazenly attack critics and scientific agencies and fulfill the goals of Project 2025.

It’s been eight days since this government shutdown officially went into effect. The Trump administration wasted no time lobbing the political football.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, announced on the first day of the shutdown cuts of up to $8 billion to “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” mostly across blue states. Then the administration froze $18 billion for two subway and tunnel infrastructure projects in New York.

The following day, Trump took to Truth Social to warn of more cuts: 

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

Afterwards, the White House press secretary doubled down, telling reporters that the administration was “unfortunately” looking at job cuts, but that Democrats had the “opportunity to prevent this” if they voted for the Republicans’ budget.

A White House internal memo circulating this Tuesday suggested a new narrative: that the more than 750,000 furloughed federal workers aren’t actually guaranteed back pay when the government shutdown ends. This comes despite a 2019 law in place designed to ensure pay occurs. 

Employees who work in environmental agencies are looking to be hit the hardest by the shutdown. Nearly 90% of Environmental Protection Agency staff have been furloughed—the largest portion of any agency. More than half of employees at the departments of the Interior and Energy will also be furloughed. 

The threatened job cuts pose two major problems: 

First, the administration has already moved forward with significant job cuts under the Department of Government Efficiency; and the day before the shutdown, another 154,000 in cuts were finalized for federal workers who took the buyout. The numbers include 200 workers from the National Weather Service and 4,000 from NASA. The final number of positions eliminated this year is expected to approach 300,000.

Second, they are likely illegal.

“I think the lesson we need to learn from the first nine months of the Trump administration is that when they say things, they mean it,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, speaking about the proposed additional layoffs at agencies.

“I have learned they have followed their playbook to the T and so I expect we continue to see efforts by the Trump administration to do what it wants to do, irrespective of the law, irrespective of appropriations, irrespective of what Congress says or thinks or wants.”

The circumstances going into this shutdown are oddly similar to the last. Trump is in the White House, and Republicans control both the House and the Senate. Last time, the shutdown centered around Trump’s pressure for billions in border wall funding. This time, it’s overextending Affordable Care Act subsidies.

A difference, though, is how the administration is going to extremes to label the Democrats as the problem.

Messages across various agency websites blame liberals for the shutdown. A note across the U.S. Forest Service website reads: “The Radical Left Democrats shut down the government.”

Similar alerts appeared across the official sites for the Department of State and the Small Business Administration. The SBA also circulated a draft of an out-of-office message to staff that said: “I am out of office for the foreseeable future because Senate Democrats voted to block a clean federal funding bill (H.R. 5371) leading to a government shutdown that is preventing the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) from serving America’s 36 million small businesses.” Department of Education staff reportedly saw a similar message inserted into their out-of-office replies. 

Critics like Whitehouse warn that such behavior is likely a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from engaging in political activity while on duty, or the Anti-Lobbying Act, which restricts government funds from being used to influence legislation pending before Congress. 

“There’s clearly a code that no money may be appropriated to pay for anything that is viewed as propaganda and/ or publicity. And, you know, I guess the idea of what’s propaganda has changed completely, whereas statements like this in the past would have been unthinkable,” said Whitehouse.