Sorry about your luck, 24 million Trump voters
It has been the case since Donald Trump’s first tenure as president that he wants to slice the size of the federal workforce. During his period in the political wilderness (also known as the Biden administration), his allies, led by his first-term Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought, put together a hefty document that included recommendations for sweeping layoffs. When Trump returned to office in January, bringing Vought with him, he and his team (then including Elon Musk) began indiscriminately laying off federal employees.
All of which is to say that the administration’s recent declarations that the shutdown allows them to slash the federal workforce are not Trump and Vought suddenly seizing upon a new idea. Instead, the shutdown offers a pretext for doing what they wanted to do anyway, to shift some of the blame for something that hasn’t proven too popular.
The same holds for other elements of the administration response to the shutdown. It’s a disruption in government that is also letting a team that has demonstrated its indifference to rules about spending and management lean into the punitive responses it has always sought.
Consider an announcement from Vought that he made on Musk’s social media platform on Wednesday.
Vought identified 16 states as targets of billions of dollars of cuts. The states below, to be precise.
Perhaps that map reminds you of something. Well, allow me to put a fine point on it.
These states also include a number of the country’s most populous. In fact, nearly 4 in 10 Americans live in states that Vought has announced will be the targets of cuts.
These are also states that contribute disproportionately to the nation’s gross domestic product.
The targeted states received $191 billion more in government services than they paid in taxes in 2023. Non-targeted states received much more in government spending, receiving $1.1 trillion more than they paid.
These sorts of things are generally abstractions to the president. So let’s put it in terms he might appreciate a bit more. While most of his voters live in non-targeted states (as do most of those who voted for Kamala Harris last year), nearly a third of 2024 Trump voters — some 24 million — live in states targeted for cuts.
The cuts Vought has presented are modest (in the scale of the federal government) and he frames them in a way that Trump voters are unlikely to oppose. But if Vought means spending from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he’s talking about impeding money that often went to building and improvement projects, not whatever Republicans think of when they think of “Green New Deal” spending.
In other words, it’s very likely that Trump’s base will feel the negative effects of the administration’s partisan attacks. And not for the first time.
Photo: Russ Vought at the White House, March 2019. (White House/Flickr)