Republicans in Washington are once again in disarray, as those who want to avert a government shutdown struggle to find enough votes to pass yet another continuing resolution. If they can’t pass something by Friday night, we’ll be forced to deal with yet another Republican government shutdown. You’d think the party that controls all three branches of government, including both the House and the Senate, would be able to do that easily, but nope. And if Republican infighting sends us into another shutdown, you’ll likely have Tesla CEO Elon Musk to thank. And he doesn’t just want a temporary shutdown, either — Musk wants a permanent one, Wired reports.
According to several sources who Wired agreed not to name, Musk wants a government shutdown because he believes that will make it easier to fire several hundred thousand more workers, especially since judges keep reminding the new administration that breaking the law is illegal. Based on what those sources told Wired, it sounds like Musk’s goal is to fire so many workers that it forces every single agency to operate like we’re in a permanent government shutdown.
That would obviously help Musk achieve his goal of crippling the government’s ability to enforce regulations, but once again, the Republican politicians who could do something to stop him would rather anonymously vent to the media. Doing stuff is hard, y’all. “You know none of this is about saving money, right?” one spineless Republican coward told Wired. “It’s all about destroying a liberal power base.”
Regulations, regulations, regulations
If there’s one thing Elon Musk hates, it’s other people telling him he can’t do something. For years, he’s clashed with regulators who very reasonably got mad at him over the horrible working conditions in his factories, his environmental destruction, possible securities and wire fraud and, of course, overselling what Tesla’s driver-assistance software is capable of. The list is actually far longer than that, but neither one of us has time for me to list every single time Musk’s gotten himself in hot water with regulators. In fact, his desire to get rid of regulators was reportedly the main reason he spent an estimated $300 million to get Trump elected and is now giddily firing veterans and park rangers while making up impossible numbers about alleged waste he couldn’t show you proof of if he tried. Regardless of whether you’re a normal person or a Republican, surely you can agree the American people deserve a better source on so-called Social Security fraud than, “Trust me, bro.”
If Musk could cause a government shutdown, though, all federal employees currently classified as nonessential would immediately be furloughed, which would mean they’d stop getting paid, but more importantly to Musk, they also wouldn’t be allowed to work until Republicans finally managed to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government until the next time Republicans shut it down. A 2023 Partnership for Public Service report estimated the number of workers classified as nonessential is somewhere in the 850,000-person range, although the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown would be even worse since essential workers don’t get paid until the government reopens, either.
But while the stock market is already tanking as a result of Republicans’ terrible policies, what they’ll do behind the scenes is arguably even more concerning. “Maybe they decide that entire government agencies don’t need to exist anymore,” Senator Mark Kelly said Monday.
Gunning for a 30-day shutdown
If Republicans go along with Musk’s plan to shut down the government, workers are still at risk of losing the jobs they aren’t allowed to do or be paid for even before they finally pass another CR. That’s because after 30 days, a Reduction In Force kicks in automatically. Workers with the most seniority and veterans would be prioritized, but triggering the RIF would result in massive staff cuts that would, in turn, cripple all federal agencies. Sure, Republicans would be happy almost no one was left to tell them they couldn’t build giant Give All Employees Cancer machines or whatever it is that the wealthy like to spend money on, good luck getting someone to respond if you try to report the GAEC machine to the feds.
“If you can shut down the government for 30 days, it’s a method of pursuing a RIF,” Nick Bednar, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law, told Wired. That said, an RIF during an extended government shutdown would also be new territory for the federal government even in normal circumstances, and in addition to the likely legal challenges, Bednar said the details are still unclear, adding, “How an automatic RIF applies is still up for debate because we’ve never seen it happen.”
And while Trump and his Johnson claim they don’t want to shut down the government, a February 11 executive order directed agency heads to prepare plans for “large-scale reductions in force (RIFs)” with a focus on “all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website.” If you thought that might mean fewer cops, though, they made sure to include an exception for “functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.”
Money has nothing to do with it
There are probably plenty of ways federal spending could be streamlined, including taking a much closer look at military spending, but don’t let anyone tell you for a single second that firing workers is about improving efficiency and saving money. Firing every single person currently classified as nonessential would only save about $110 billion in payroll expenses annually. There’s a good chance it would save money in the same way buying the cheapest used tires you can find on Craigslist saves you money, but for the sake of the argument, we’ll give them the $110 billion, which anyone who can count will correctly tell you is a truly massive amount of money. That’s also about $890 billion short of the $1 trillion Musk has claimed he wants to cut from the budget, which some quick mental math tells me is way, way more than $110 billion.
In a world where Republicans actually cared about something other than getting rid of regulations and taxes so billionaires like Elon Musk can do whatever they want, no matter how many people they hurt, they wouldn’t be starting with slashing jobs and driving up the unemployment rate because even if Musk fed the entire federal workforce into a woodchipper, it still wouldn’t get him anywhere close to that $1 trillion he talks about. Firing people before you know what they do isn’t great in the private sector, either, but Twitter crashing because you fired the person who could have prevented it isn’t remotely the same thing as a drunk pilot crashing a plane full of people because you fired the people who stop that kind of stuff.
No, you go after the federal workforce first because people doing their jobs get in the way of billionaires doing whatever they want. The more people you manage to get rid of, the easier it is to break the law without consequences.
Shutdowns are terrible for the economy
While a RIF triggered by a shutdown that furloughs workers for more than 30 days hasn’t happened before, we don’t have to look very far into the past to see how much a prolonged shutdown would hurt the economy. When Republicans shut the government down on December 22, 2018, they didn’t allow the government to reopen until January 25, 2019, meaning it lasted 35 days. A later report from the Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown reduced Q1 real GDP by $8 billion, all so Republicans could rile up their base and stick it to the libs or something.
Republicans using a government shutdown as a creative way to get around worker protections and slash jobs also open the government up to lawsuits that are far more likely to succeed, at least before the Republican-controlled Supreme Court steps in, than they were in 2013 when furloughed employees sued for back pay after, you guessed it, yet another Republican government shutdown. They may be gambling on SCOTUS letting them get away with it, but as the previous illegal attempt to cut off all funding for USAID showed, Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett can’t be counted on to go along with absolutely everything Republicans want. At the very least, give them a creative theory they can run with that isn’t just, “We won the election, so laws we don’t like no longer apply.”
Is that great news? Of course not. Everything Republicans are doing looks, by any objective standard, like their goal is to send us back to 1929. Heck, Trump’s even doing a redux of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that helped turn a stock market crash into the worst depression this country has ever seen. Hopefully, for the sake of everyone involved except the billionaires, we figure out a way to stop Republicans from succeeding because in addition to the part where we didn’t begin to crawl out of the Great Depression until several years later, it also led to another World War. Surely, unless you’re one of those freaks who believes they can trigger the end times by causing global calamity, you can agree we don’t want that even if you’ve never voted for a Democrat in your life.
