The federal government shut down on Wednesday as President Donald Trump threatened mass federal layoffs. Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats are refusing to support a Republican spending bill without guarantees to extend Obamacare provisions set to expire and reverse GOP health care cuts earlier this year.
“Democrats are … trying to reverse some of the cuts from the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. “So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they’re fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks to Washington about the government shutdown and the impact it will have on public services, including essential services and federal workers.
We’re also following a federal court case where an appointee of Ronald Reagan blasted the Trump administration for unlawfully targeting pro-Palestine students for protected speech.
“It’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens,” says Ramya Krishnan, lecturer at Columbia University Law School and senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented plaintiffs in the case. “And if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can’t lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript:
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy.
The federal government shut down just after midnight on Wednesday.
The shutdown could lead to mass federal layoffs and threaten some essential services, though most critical workers in air traffic control and Social Security will work without pay for the time being.
If this all sounds familiar to you, it should. Shutdowns have become more common over the last 30 years. And the most recent “showdowns” have felt more and more like a charade. Another fight threatened to shut down the government just seven months ago. The most recent shutdown is the second under Donald Trump. The first under Trump, in 2018, marked the longest government shutdown in U.S. history — 35 days — forcing some federal workers to take out loans to make ends meet.
Republicans, who control both branches of Congress and the White House, have not passed a federal spending bill since Trump took office. They need Democratic votes to do so, but Democrats are currently withholding their support in efforts to show that this time, they really are trying to stand up to Trump.
In the meantime, Trump is using federal workers as pawns — threatening mass permanent layoffs — and delaying the next jobs report. Still, as we’ve discussed on this show before, Republicans, at least for now, appear to be controlling the narrative.
Joining me now to help us understand the bigger picture is my colleague, Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington.
Jessie, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Jessica Washington: Thanks for having me on.
AL: And just a note, we’re speaking on Wednesday, October 1.
So Jess, you were on the hill Wednesday morning. What did you see?
JW: The vibes are, are definitely a little ominous over there. I think even just walking in, things felt pretty negative.
So I walked past some Capitol Police when I first arrived, and they were talking about the shutdown. I mean, they’ll have to potentially go without pay. And so there was a lot of talk. They were saying, I don’t care about Democrats or Republicans. They need to figure this out. But they’ll still have to work during the government shutdown, potentially without pay.
And then attending the Republican leadership press conference was [a] very different story. They were very angry. They were blaming the shutdown on Democrats wanting health care for undocumented immigrants. Obviously [this] isn’t true, but they were playing this with ominous music videos of Democrats who were opposing the last shutdown. It was just this very heated, very intense blame game.
I think for Democrats we’re also seeing a lot of anger. And a lot of outrage over Republicans’ refusal to consider bipartisan legislation on this.
AL: What does a government shutdown actually mean? How will this affect everyday people?
JW: So a government shutdown occurs when Congress fails to pass by the start of the fiscal year — so October 1 — fails to pass the multiple appropriations bills in order to get the government funded. And so what happens here isn’t necessarily that all government functions cease. In fact, essential work has to continue. Medicaid, Medicare payment, Social Security, those are all unaffected by a shutdown.
But kind of as time goes on, the shutdown becomes more and more dangerous in terms of everyday Americans not getting things like food assistance, or particularly assistance for pregnant women, babies as well.
The bigger impact really is for federal workers who are potentially going to have to go without pay. There are also threats from the Trump administration of mass firing, so we are really not sure what the exact impact is going to be yet.
It is important to note that Congress and the president will still continue to get paid, while federal workers may have to go without pay. So that’s just an important thing to remember in a government shutdown.
AL: How did we get here and why hasn’t the government passed a spending bill yet? Is that unusual?
JW: Yeah. So unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you’re looking at it, it isn’t unusual for the government not to have passed a spending bill at this point.
So continuing resolutions are kind of Congress’s way of getting around having to actually make decisions about the budget and about how they want spending to go forward. So what happens in a continuing resolution is that Congress agrees to fund the government at the same levels as before.
So right now what we’re seeing is both the failure to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at current levels, and also a larger systemic failure to pass appropriations bills. So since Trump has come into office, we haven’t actually seen one of these larger spending packages passed, and so that’s how we ended up here.
AL: Republicans are obviously blaming Democrats, even though they fully control the government, although they do need 60 votes to pass this kind of spending bill. I saw the official House Democrats Twitter account posted a picture of Democratic leaders taking a selfie at the Capitol on Tuesday night that read “House Democrats are in DC and ready to cancel the cuts, lower the costs, save health care,” which they’re now being dragged for. How are Democratic leaders responding to this shutdown?
JW: So Democratic leadership is really trying to focus on what they’re trying to accomplish by, I don’t want to say enabling the shutdown. It’s a little more complicated than that, but by not passing this continuing resolution that Republicans want.
So they’re really trying to highlight what their asks are. And what those asks are, are an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies to make sure that Americans who get their health care through that program are able to get their subsidies at the existing level and don’t have to spend more on health care.
Democrats are also interested in trying to reverse some of the cuts from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed earlier this year to Medicaid, so also to ensure that more Americans can continue to access Medicaid. So what Democrats are really trying to message here is that they’re fighting for health care, both to reverse some of these Medicaid cuts and also to ensure that the Affordable Care Act subsidies continue.
AL: Democrats also came under fire for voting to extend funding the last time this happened in March. They seem dug in for the moment. Why is their strategy different here and will it work?
JW: I mean, I would have to imagine, and I haven’t had conversations with Democratic leadership about this, but I would have to imagine a lot of the strategy here, the strategy shift is that they were really attacked last time around for essentially just agreeing to let Republicans continue to make massive cuts to health care and a bunch of other things that Republicans wanted last time around. And so they’re using this spending fight, which they didn’t last time. But what they’re trying to do this time around, which is very different from the last time around, is not just simply capitulate and agree to keep the government spending levels and then just continue to pass Republican measures, which obviously cut health care as well as a bunch of other things that Americans rely on every day.
And so what Democrats are trying to do here is take a stand and not take that hit that they did last time. Particularly Minority Leader [Chuck] Schumer took a massive hit, by capitulating to Republicans. And we’re seeing a very different strategy this time around.
AL: The Trump administration and Republicans are using this shutdown as an opportunity to permanently lay off a significant number of federal workers. Can you tell us more about that? What would that mean?
JW: So President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought have both threatened to mass-fire federal employees during the government shutdown. Now, obviously, they’re using this both as leverage, but also a very real threat. We know that they have been targeting federal employees who have in some cases won, in some cases not.
And so the unions representing these federal employees have sued the Trump administration and have said that this is an illegal action, that the administration cannot go ahead and just mass-fire federal workers during a government shutdown, that there are legal protections that should keep these workers in place and should even if they have to temporarily go without pay, get them back pay once the government reopens. Obviously the pain of a government shutdown is going to be felt by federal workers regardless, especially if it continues into the next month or so.
AL: So essentially what you’re saying is that this is all happening without any congressional oversight, right?
JW: Yeah. This would be happening without Congress’s input.
AL: So I mean, it sounds like it’s also potentially a way for the government to permanently fire employees in programs at their discretion. I mean, is that a possibility?
JW: Yeah, so it’s definitely— and we’re getting into complicated legal territory here in terms of what the government can do, what they can get away with, what the Supreme Court will allow them to get away with, what district courts will allow them to get away with. But what the Trump administration is trying to do is — without Congress’s input, without the judiciary’s input — they’re trying to just mass-fire these employees. And we know this has been a goal from the administration.
I think it also has to be understood as a threat and leverage against Democrats who obviously, you know, would like to keep federal employees in their agencies and with pay. And so this is definitely both a threat and then also a real policy goal that this administration has been pursuing since they started
AL: At this point, what would it take to reopen the government? What happens next?
JW: Likely it would take a bipartisan bill, something where Democrats could feel as if they got a win on health care. However, we could see more Democrats peel off. Republicans only need seven Democrats in the Senate to pass their continuing resolution. We already saw on Tuesday night that a few Democratic senators, including [John] Fetterman — he’s obviously a notable person to the Intercept audience — we already saw some senators side with Republicans and agree to pass this continuing resolution. Now, if they’re able to get enough Democrats in the Senate to peel off, then they’ll be able to fund the government.
Now an alternative, obviously, is that Republicans come together with Democrats and actually make some level of agreement on healthcare in order to prevent these massive Medicaid cuts that we know are coming as a result of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
AL: What is the long-term effect of putting the government through this kind of stress? I mean, we already saw this happen back in March. It feels like it’s becoming more frequent. This used to not happen. I mean, prior to 1980, shutdown threats came on the table, but more often Congress just went through a funding gap where the government actually didn’t shut down, but this is becoming a more common thing. I mean, does this cause permanent damage?
JW: I mean, certainly it causes institutional damage in a number of ways. I mean, one, you have public trust that erodes as a result of a government shutdown. So we know that’s part of it. Obviously federal employees are going to be furloughed. They’re going to go without pay. After they receive their next paycheck, [they] will then have to go without pay during the shutdown. So obviously they’re feeling a huge amount of this burden. But then the American public more broadly will also start to feel this if it continues. So a lot of these agencies have funding that will last them for a short period of time.
But as the time period goes on, we’re going to see certain services cut. So, for example, food assistance programs currently have enough funding to continue for a little while and to keep giving people their subsidies. But eventually those programs will run out of money. If the government isn’t funded on a larger level, agencies will have to furlough their employees, which means they won’t be at work, which means that vital government services won’t be getting the attention that they need, obviously, aside from essential carveouts that statutorily have to continue even during a government shutdown.
AL: Thank you so much, Jessie, for walking us through all of that. We’re going to leave it there.
JW: Thank you for having me.
Break
AL: Next we’re going to turn to a scathing ruling out of a federal court in Massachusetts that blasts Trump’s attacks on pro-Palestine students. Judge William G. Young, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, said Trump weaponized an unconstitutional definition of antisemitism to intimidate and deport pro-Palestine activists.
Joining me now to break it all down is Ramya Krishnan, a lecturer at Columbia Law School and a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented the plaintiffs. Also joining is my colleague, Intercept newsroom counsel and reporter, Shawn Musgrave.
Ramya and Shawn, welcome to the show.
Ramya Krishnan: Thanks for having me.
Shawn Musgrave: Thanks, Akela.
AL: Ramya, I’ll start with you. What is so remarkable about this ruling?
RK: Well, it’s a historic ruling that rightly affirms that the First Amendment protects non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. just as it protects citizens. And that if free speech means anything in this country, it means the government can’t lock you up simply because it disagrees with your political views. And that principle, that basic idea, is foundational to our democracy.
So what Judge [William G.] Young held is that the secretaries of state and homeland security intentionally and in concert engaged in a campaign of intimidation, a campaign that involved arresting, detaining and deporting individuals like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi in order to chill pro-Palestinian speech and speech critical of Israel. And it held that this campaign, this policy, is viewpoint discriminatory and in violation of the First Amendment.
AL: Ramya, let’s back up a bit. Can you give some background on the case and the trial? What’s at stake?
RK: This case is a challenge to the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining and deporting non-citizen students and faculty based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy. So since Trump took office, we’ve seen a number of non-citizens targeted under this policy of ideological deportation. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University undergraduate, was arrested when he attended his naturalization interview. Rümeysa Öztürk, a grad student at Tufts University, was seized by masked ICE agents from a public street in Somerville, Massachusetts, because she wrote an op-ed that was critical of her university’s failure to divest from Israel. And then you had Mahmoud Khalil, of course, who helped lead student protests at Columbia, who was arrested in the lobby of his apartment building in New York and spirited away to a detention center in Louisiana and locked up there for more than three months. And these are just a handful of the examples we’ve seen.
And these actions have cast a really powerful chill on university campuses across the country, causing students and faculty to self-censor. We’ve seen non-citizen scholars and students who have withdrawn from political protests, purge their social media, and declining to publish scholarly and other public writing that they fear will put them in the administration’s crosshairs. Some are even self-censoring in the classroom.
So we brought this case on behalf of the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association because we believe, as they believe, that no student or faculty member should have to live in fear that they could be seized at any moment by ICE agents from their homes or from the street simply for engaging in lawful political expression.
AL: Shawn, when we were discussing this with our colleagues the other day, you said this judge could be impeached. Why?
SM: So that might have been an inflammatory way of putting it. This is an extraordinary ruling — not just for the holding itself, but also the way in which Judge Young, a Reagan appointee, set about his task of ruling on it. I mean, as I was writing this up, it kind of felt like I was doing a literary review of a piece of creative nonfiction. There’s some fascinating things in the format that we can talk about, but it also is very much a broadside on how the Trump administration has carried out not only this policy that has been found unconstitutional, but also immigration enforcement generally since January.
In discussing the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, [he] talks about masked agents and calls the testimony of the acting ICE director, I think, squalid and dishonorable — uses the type of language that is much more typical of litigants than of judges in their rulings. And so, I’m not sure if this is impeachable material, but it’ll certainly be attacked, I think, as being very direct and honest about the state of our democracy. And so for that reason, it was striking in addition to the actual constitutional holdings, which I think are also so important.
AL: I’m glad you’re getting into this because it strikes me as worth noting that perhaps the reaction to this really dense ruling that might not ordinarily draw attention is in part, maybe, surprise that, as you’re saying, Shawn, a judge is speaking so plainly about what the administration is doing. Is that sort of pushback from judges becoming less common under this administration, or what’s going on there?
SM: I don’t know if it’s becoming less common. I mean, one of the interesting things that we’re seeing — and I say “interesting” and, I don’t know, another word to use there is maybe “terrifying” — is that judges in the various cases dealing, especially with deportations, are applying less of a deference to the administration. There’s this idea in litigation that this presumption of regularity that is often given to the government in different contexts, essentially the assumption on the part of judges is often, “The government is telling the truth, they’re going to do what they said that they were going to do, they’re going to comply with rulings.” Things like that, that’s becoming less common. And in fact, I think we are seeing plenty of rulings, including from Trump appointees, Bush appointees — typically conservative judges — not taking for granted that this administration is going to follow through.
And we saw, actually, plenty of that in the very end of Judge Young’s ruling, this kind of thinking: All right, he’s found that this policy was unconstitutional. What is he as a judge going to do about it in face of defiance of orders by this administration? So we are seeing a real shift. I think this is part of an extreme example, perhaps, but an example still of a shift in tone among the judiciary in this administration.
AL: What is the next step in the case?
RK: The next step in the case is that Judge Young is going to hold a hearing on remedy. So in this first phase of the case, which followed a trial, he determined that the administration has been engaged in a policy of targeting non-citizens based on their pro-Palestinian viewpoints, and that this practice, this policy violates the First Amendment. In the second phase of the proceedings, Judge Young will be deciding how best to remedy the unlawful conduct of the administration.
SM: Ramya, can I ask: What did you think about the last section of Judge Young’s opinion about remedies? Because he previewed some restrictions that he saw on both the potential efficacy of remedies on this administration and also in terms of his role as a judge in crafting a remedy to unconstitutional conduct. What did you take from those last couple pages of the ruling on that front?
RK: Well, I think that fundamentally he recognized that there has to be a remedy to the administration’s unconstitutional conduct.
If he didn’t believe that he was empowered to issue a remedy in this case, then he wouldn’t have been able to issue this ruling at all. Because a key component of establishing your ability to bring a case, what’s called standing, is that the injuries that you assert can actually be redressed by the court.
So he clearly believes that he can issue a remedy here. And what we’ll be asking for is a declaration that what the administration did hear was unlawful, which would be entirely in line with the ruling that he has just issued; and secondly, an order forbidding the administration from engaging in this conduct in the future.
AL: For listeners who are unfamiliar with this case, it received a lot of attention earlier this year when a federal official admitted in court that the government had used information from far-right Zionist groups like Betar and Canary Mission to target students. Ramya, have you learned any more about that?
RK: Yeah, I mean in in some ways, what we heard at trial confirmed what we knew all along, which is that the administration was targeting these non-citizens students and faculty based solely on their pro-Palestinian advocacy. But in many ways, we learn new details that add to this picture of just the scale and the scope and the intensity of the operation the government was engaged in. And as you said, we heard testimony from DHS officials describing the large-scale operation they launched to identify pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. An operation that by their own admission involves scouring lists of suspected protesters from the likes of Canary Mission and producing reports that repeated those organizations’ unvetted allegations that the protestors are antisemitic and pro-Hamas.
That revelation was clearly influential in Judge Young’s decision, and in particular his determination that the whole reason — the whole purpose — of the government’s policy here, its campaign was to chill the speech of students and faculty who would otherwise engage in pro-Palestinian expression and association.
SM: In the various petitions that Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and the others have brought, we learned a little bit about each of their cases: how they were targeted, the timeline for their particular case, and how they were targeted for detention. What I think was most valuable about this litigation effort was how much it — using those handful of examples — still zoomed out to honestly the very mundane, what Judge Young called the “frictionless,” review process that resulted in Rümeysa Öztürk being grabbed off off the street.
And we saw how the combination of bureaucratic resources combined with the Department of Homeland Security, specifically Homeland Security Investigations, and then passing that information to the State Department to very quickly decide that these folks should either be detained or deported. So I think we got a massive amount of information in particular from the bench trial that Judge Young held over the summer.
AL: I want to raise one other point, which is that I’m not sure — and please correct me if I’m wrong — I’m not sure that we’ve seen another federal judge isolate the administration’s use of and what he describes as its weaponization of antisemitism in this way. Which I think, at least for me, is significant given the amount of federal and state legislation moving around adopting this definition of antisemitism, the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition, which they’re talking about a broader, more amorphous form of how the administration has shifted its own definition of antisemitism, but they are effectively one and the same.
I’m wondering if you all can respond to that.
RK: Yeah. I mean, I think part of that arises from the frankly, astonishing testimony we heard at trial from Senior State Department official John Armstrong, who personally made the decision to revoke Rümeysa Öztürk’s visa, and who authored the memos that went to Secretary [Marco] Rubio recommending that he revoke the green cards of people like Mahmoud Khalil.
What he said on the stand was that on his understanding of antisemitism and support for terrorism — by the way, his understanding matters because apparently there has been no official guidance issued in the State Department or DHS about how to define these incredibly controversial concepts. And on his understanding of those terms, criticism of Israel — including its actions in Gaza — is grounds for deporting non-citizens. In fact, he said that criticism of the Trump administration’s policies or actions toward Israel may qualify. And I think Young was really taken aback by that admission and made clear both at trial and in his decision that, in his view, those definitions sweep in a great deal of constitutionally protected and legitimate political speech.
AL: Which is what we’ve been saying this whole time, right? Like this is not shocking to anyone who has been covering these cases or writing about this phenomenon of this weaponization of antisemitism. This is the conversation we’ve been having for so long, but the fact that, again, this is being issued in a federal court and it’s being issued also by Reagan appointee, which is not, whatever that significant, but will it have an effect, I guess, is the question. Will this have any material effect on the cases of students like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi?
RK: I mean, I think it gives them additional ammunition in their own cases against the Trump administration on which they’re challenging as unlawful their arrests and detentions; and the administration’s attempted deportation of them.
Because the government, in their cases, has been claiming that they have this secret evidence that establishes that in fact they were targeting these individuals based not only on their political speech, but based on other legitimate factors. And Judge Young, he saw all of the underlying evidence from those cases, and he emphatically reached the conclusion that these individuals were being targeted based on their political viewpoints alone.
SM: Yeah. And there are other folks who are still in ICE detention who were targeted this way. Leqaa Kordia, who’s in detention in Prairieland, where I think Dr. [Badar Khan] Suri was also held. [Kordia] is still trying to make arguments both in federal court and in immigration court, that she should be released either on bond or or in the habeas petition because her detention is unconstitutional is her argument.
I do think this ruling will be cited frequently in those challenges, including because in the immigration proceedings that are ongoing for, I believe, all of these individuals, the burden is typically on the non-citizen to at different stages of the immigration proceedings. And I think what Judge Young really did by putting together this authoritative timeline of how this policy played out over these cases is show how thin the evidence was against some of these most high-profile cases where the secretary of homeland security was going on Twitter to make all kinds of claims that they couldn’t back up in in court.
And so I think that does just cast significant doubt in every other case about the strength of evidence used to detain other people.
AL: Is that enough to stop them from going after other pro-Palestine student activists or —
RK: Well, with any other administration, we would expect this decision to have an immediate impact.
I think what will be crucial here is the precise relief that we ultimately get from Judge Young. That’s why we’ll be vigorously arguing that we need robust relief that will get this administration to cease and desist from its efforts to exact retribution on people for their political speech.
SM: And I think Judge Young closes by asking if, essentially, the American people will sleepwalk into fascism. He, I think, is very much throwing up a flare that this one ruling — even if he can fashion the perfect “was targeted” remedy — is not going to fix the situation we find ourselves in. He didn’t say what else was necessary, but I think implicit in that acknowledgment from the judge is that it will take political action. [That] political leaders need to stop looking to courts — I mean, the courts need to keep issuing clear-eyed rulings like this — but that’s not the way that you stop an administration like this one from doing blatantly unconstitutional things. It requires other levers.
RK: I think that’s such an important observation.
I read his conclusion to really be a call to arms: a recognition that if we are to protect our most fundamental freedoms, if we’re to protect our democracy, then we, all of us, need to show up, stand up and show courage and meet this moment. And it won’t do for people to sit on the sidelines.
SM: And I do think in his own way, he was calling out conservatives. I mean, he closed his opinion by quoting from Reagan, who appointed him, who gave a speech saying that freedom needed to be protected every generation. Essentially, that we can’t bank on freedom just continuing just because we’ve had it in the past. So I think he’s leaning into his own bonafide as a conservative judge, I think is a signal across the political spectrum.
AL: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you both for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.
RK: Thanks, Akela.
SM: Thanks.
AL: Before we close, a quick update on last week’s episode. We spoke to Tommy Marcus, who joined the Global Sumud Flotilla convoy delivering food and medical supplies to Gaza.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces intercepted the fleet of small boats as it attempted to break the aid blockade. Marcus now appears to be among the hundreds of volunteers Israel is detaining, according to organizers.
We’ll continue to follow the story.
That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
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Thanks for listening.