This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
We are in a government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans have not been able to come to agreement — are nowhere near, as I say this, coming to an agreement — about how to fund the government. The nature of this shutdown, people had lots of ideas about what, if it happened, it should be about. Should Democrats demand concessions on tariffs? Should it be about authoritarianism? What it is about, in the reality we’re living in, is health care. The Affordable Care Act for the last few years has been supported by tax credits that have made the premiums much lower and have expanded coverage under it enormously. Those credits expire at the end of this year. If nothing is done to keep them from expiring, there will be a huge premium shock, and millions of people will lose health insurance.
I wanted to have an episode diving into the actual policy debates and stakes of this shutdown, the spending fights that led to it, the unusual ways in which Republicans have been breaking Democratic trust that helped set the stage for it, the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid debates that are now at the center of it and the way the Trump administration is trying to bring very particular forms of pressure to bear on the Democrats, trying to break them and make them capitulate. But they’re doing so in ways that might actually be uniting them.
The person I wanted to talk about all this with is Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, one of the largest progressive think tanks. She worked in the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations. Under Obama, she was central in helping to craft and pass the Affordable Care Act. Under Biden, she was a director of the Domestic Policy Council. So she knows all the policy here, inside and out.
Ezra Klein: Neera Tanden, welcome to the show.
Neera Tanden: Thank you so much for having me.
If you’re out there following coverage of the shutdown, you’re hearing a lot about something called a C.R. What is a C.R.?
“C.R.” stands for “continuing resolution,” and it is basically legislation that says that the funding levels of the government will just continue as they are for a specified period.
Now, what’s different about this C.R. is that the president has used unilateral powers to end run whatever the agreements are in Congress. But generally speaking, a continuing resolution is an agreement to fund the government.
Let’s go into that little disclaimer you mentioned there, the end runs around it. This is a debate about another term people might be hearing, “rescissions.” What are rescissions?
Rescissions are legislation that pulls back funding that has been agreed to. What’s interesting about the rescissions packages is they are not subject to filibusters, so it just takes a simple majority.
If it takes 60 votes to come to an agreement and then it takes a simple majority to claw back funding, that means that whatever you agree to in a bipartisan manner can be undone in a partisan vote.
Often in congressional fights, there are the things that people following the news know everybody’s fighting about, and then sometimes there are more internal procedural things that have completely pissed everybody off. And this rescissions bit is — from my talking to people in Congress — pretty significant.
What’s happening is that you have Democrats and Republicans coming together, making these funding deals. They need 60 votes or more because of the filibuster. And then, in what’s fairly unusual, Republicans are then clawing back money for things like PBS and public media and U.S.A.I.D. through rescissions.
It has created this collapse. I would not say Democrats trusted Republicans a lot before this, but the sense that they will now go around the deal you just made has created this harder-to-answer question: How do you make a deal at all under those conditions?
Absolutely. I think it’s really a combination of things. It’s rescissions and then another really self-explanatory term, “impoundments.” Rescissions are subject to a vote. Impoundments are when the president, the executive branch, refuses to spend money allocated by Congress.
The president has just not been spending funds allocated to the National Institutes of Health, to the National Science Foundation, to other elements of the government. Honestly, I don’t think we even have a full picture of what the executive branch has not implemented of these congressional deals.
I think it’s really both of these issues, but it’s also the fact that essentially, Russell Vought can decide to just not listen to Congress at all.
I think that is really the fundamental threat to Article I. They’re both threats to Article I, but it’s this combination where essentially the executive branch is usurping Article I’s spending powers.
I know this is totally in the weeds here, but Congress is designated to decide how the government allocates funding, and that’s really being watered down.
What’s interesting about this debate is I do think probably a number of Republicans — particularly in the Senate and some in the House who are on the Appropriations Committees — would secretly like the president’s powers to be limited, because it really is undermining their authority.
But I think you’re absolutely right. At the end of the day, we have this Washington talk about a clean C.R. But fundamentally, this is very different from any other period that I’ve been in Washington, where it’s not a clean C.R. because you can undo it. You could have an agreement between Republicans and Democrats on what is called a clean C.R., and then a month or two later, Russ Vought could just decide not to spend multiple billions of dollars for an agency.
And then what has anyone even agreed to? So I think that is a fundamental part of this debate as well.
There’s also the reality that if rescissions become common practice or impoundment becomes common practice, there will be Democratic presidents, and you can imagine them using that authority: There’s a big spending deal; it funds ICE to a certain level. “Actually, we’re unfunding ICE to that level. We’re not spending a bunch of the money on certain kinds of border enforcement.”
As you said, it seems in the weeds, but the question of how you do normal congressional procedure when the deals stop holding is a pretty big one here. But I think it would be both selling the Democrats a little bit short and selling the Republicans and their argument a little bit short to say this is just about rescissions.
Democrats have increasingly come to the view that they can’t let President Trump run the government this way. There’s been a lot of debate over what they should try to draw the line on. Should it be on neofascism? Should it be on authoritarianism? Should it be on masked agents in the streets?
Where they decided to draw the line was health care. They’re not just asking for a clean extension of the funding in the government. They are trying to change what is about to happen in the health care markets. What is about to happen in health care markets?
Under the Affordable Care Act, there are exchange markets. This is a way in which middle-class people can get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and these marketplaces exist in every state.
In 2020 there were 12 million people in these marketplaces, and now there’s 24 million people in these marketplaces — in part because during the Biden administration, Congress took two votes to make the marketplaces more affordable. Essentially, they expanded the value of tax credits people receive in order to purchase health care in these marketplaces, and that funding is going to run out at the end of this year.
What is imminently happening is that insurers are sending out notices now to people — it’s just beginning, it’ll increase over the next several weeks — because open enrollment, the time when people choose what health insurance they’re going to have, starts Nov. 1.
People are going to start getting notices about what their premiums will be in the marketplaces in the coming year, and they will be subject to premium shock. The expanded tax credits were really substantial investments.
People are going to see, according to KFF, on average, their premiums double. A family of four making $55,000 a year, they’re going to see their prices quadruple. That is a huge price spike.
Democrats are saying that we should come together and avoid that price spike. And I will note the Democrats at the end of the last Congress, in the waning days of the Biden administration, they tried to come to a negotiation with Republicans around the premium tax credit.
Everyone knew this was coming. People talked about it. Republicans didn’t want to deal with it then.
I don’t know if people realize how big the increase in coverage was under the changes made in the Inflation Reduction Act. In 2020, 11.4 million people were enrolled in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. That’s Obamacare, as we understood it when Joe Biden becomes president. By 2024, the enrollment nearly doubles, depending on how you look at it.
Who are these people? Who is this massive increase of people flooding into the Affordable Care Act marketplaces between 2021 and 2024?
There are people who found the marketplace pretty expensive before and then found it affordable.
I think it’s really interesting because a sustained Republican criticism of the Affordable Care Act after it was passed was that it wasn’t really affordable. They didn’t want to make it more affordable, but they just said it was too expensive.
I know that you covered the passage of the Affordable Care Act. I worked on the passage of the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration. The truth is the marketplaces are really two forms of coverage in the Affordable Care Act.
One is Medicaid expansion, which is people who are pretty poor, and then people who are above the Medicaid threshold.
Ninety-nine percent of these people are working Americans. They are disproportionately in small businesses — they work for small businesses or own small businesses. They make anywhere from $15,000 a year to $55,000, individually or as a family.
So people are choosing to buy health care in the marketplaces, and it’s subsidized health care. The government does help offset a lot of the cost.
As you said, we got over 11 million people, roughly, in the first 10 years of Obamacare to get health care. But I do think it was really not affordable enough to a lot of people.
President Biden, first in the American Rescue Plan with Congress, expanded the tax credits. And then Democrats, through the Inflation Reduction Act, extended those tax credits until this year. Fundamentally, we learned that people really wanted health care if you made it more affordable.
Again, everyone has skin in the game. People have to invest their own dollars. People at higher incomes have to spend more money.
But what we really learned is that people desperately want to have health care that is affordable. And when we made it more affordable, as you noted, it basically doubled the number of people who were getting health care.
I think, in this country, the fact that we have the lowest rates of uninsured in our history is a profoundly good thing for the country.
You mentioned that a lot of people we’re talking about here make a little bit too much money for Medicaid. There’s another group, though, which is people who live in red states that did not expand Medicaid. And one of the ironies of this fight is that Democrats are shutting the government down to protect and extend tax credits that heavily, disproportionately benefit red states because in a bunch of these red states, they didn’t expand Medicaid, and it means more people get the tax credits.
So you have more than 10 percent of the population now in some states using the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies. Talk to me a bit about both the policy and the politics of that.
The politics of health care has been really odd over the last decade or so because, while we have gotten 40 states to do Medicaid expansions, there are 10 states that have not passed Medicaid expansion.
In those states, you do see a much higher percentage of people on the exchange markets just because they’re so clearly desperate to have health care and they can’t really get it. It is kind of insane that we live in a country where you have states where if you’re a slightly higher income, you get into the exchange markets, but really low-income people don’t. I do think that is very perverted, and I’m glad that over a decade so many more states have come on. But that does end up being a situation where, as KFF has noted, we’re talking about 75 percent of people in these exchange markets being in places that Trump won.
It’s just a long way of saying that Republicans are essentially choosing to make people in their states who already are struggling — I mean, these are not wealthy people — face, again, not just a slight premium increase but a real premium shock.
This gets to the politics of this in an interesting way. KFF did a poll on whether or not people thought the tax credits should be extended. They did this roughly at the end of September.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans were in support of extending the tax credits. You don’t get that high of a number from many things anymore.
But that included majorities of not just self-described Republicans but also self-identified MAGA supporters. It had nearly 60 percent support from people who said they were MAGA.
There was a Wall Street Journal story the other day where Trump administration officials were starting to say anonymously that they’re actually worried about this, that they feel that this is actually a tough thing for them to own. It’s not going to be great for them if health care premiums skyrocket for millions of people on their watch.
The shutdown fight is a partisan fight. The politics of this, the polling of this, who it helps and who it hurts are not a partisan issue. It does not break along partisan lines.
Absolutely. This reminds me of where we were in the A.C.A. repeal debate. That was another debate, eight years ago, where we were talking about President Trump’s effort to repeal the A.C.A.
In the heat of that debate, we were in a very similar place. Fifty percent of Republicans did not want to repeal the A.C.A. A majority of MAGA supporters did not want to repeal the A.C.A. Now, why is that? It’s because this program is actually helping people that need health care coverage.
It’s helping people in red states. It is a project of government to actually help people. And I also think we’re in a moment, which is a little bit different from past moments, when people feel that the cost of living is very high across the board.
It’s also really important to remember that if these premiums double, a lot of people will choose not to get coverage. If people choose not to get coverage, over time, we will see other people being impacted by that. Emergency coverage goes up. Hospitals shift prices to others.
We also know that when people lose coverage — like Medicaid from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which I just struggle to say so often — we know that when people lose Medicaid coverage, it actually drives up prices for other people in the market.
That takes a longer time, but people totally understand that, in this moment, it seems like the opposite of common sense to allow this price spike to happen to people when it’s completely avoidable.
And the truth is, just to touch on the last point you made, Republicans know this is a problem. I do not think it is an accident that last week the Trump White House had a leak into The Wall Street Journal saying they do feel like they have to negotiate this.
From what I’ve heard of the meeting with Senator Schumer, Congressman Jeffries, Speaker Johnson and the majority leader, Thune, with President Trump is that the president really does seem to get that he has to deal with this problem and that he might need to make a deal with Democrats.
Then I’d say the last crazy point about this is people seem to acknowledge they have to deal with it. They just don’t want to deal with it now, which I think just sounds nonsensical to most people.
Well, let me take that argument. What you hear if you listen to interviews right now with Thune and Johnson is that Republicans are happy to discuss this, they would love to negotiate over this, they understand it’s a problem — but only after the government is reopened.
They’re not going to allow the government to be held hostage on this issue. They will not talk about this issue while the government is closed. What’s your take on that?
I think it just sounds ridiculous to people, right?
People are going to get the premium shock with their notices in the next few weeks. I think it’s important that the Republicans are acknowledging that this is a big problem — maybe more Thune than Johnson.
They’re acknowledging that this is a problem. But then that’s sort of an intellectual trap, right? Because if you’re a person who’s worried about your health care costs going up, how does this sound to you? “We know it’s a problem, but we’d like you to get your premium notice, and then at the end of the year, after you have to make a decision — you’re supposed to start making decisions on whether you’re going to purchase health care in November — we’ll deal with that.” Who thinks that’s what you should do to your constituents?
Once you’ve conceded this is a problem, then I don’t really understand why the argument is we need to deal with it later and not now. Obviously, I feel like every Democrat in America feels like they can trust what the congressional Republican leadership says and Donald Trump as far as they could throw them.
I just think it sounds cuckoo when you think about the arguments people are making right now.
“You give up your leverage, and then we promise you the deal you’ll get is great.”
There was actually a funny moment on the Sunday shows this weekend. I was watching Johnson being interviewed, and he is being pressed: OK, you say this is a real problem. You say you need to deal with it. Are you saying that you support the extension of the subsidies?
Clip: Interview with Mike Johnson on “Face the Nation With Margaret Brennan.”
And he very, very clearly did not say yes.
The other Republican argument is that what Democrats are really trying to do here is give health care subsidies to, as they put it, illegal aliens. What is that argument they’re making?
OK, I just need to say this is the most deeply cynical, ridiculous thing.
I watched your shoulders actually fall. Like, “I can’t believe I have to deal with this [expletive].”
It’s really funny to me. I worked in the White House, and I could just imagine them dialing up an illegal immigration argument, as they have to deal with confrontation on health care — which, of course, they know that they have to deal with anyway. It’s just totally odd, but OK.
The best case of their argument is that during the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republicans limited Medicaid coverage to legal immigrants in the United States. They made it more difficult for legal immigrants — no illegal aliens, no undocumented people, nobody crossing the border — we’re talking about people like Afghan refugees, Ukrainian refugees, people subject to domestic violence who get protected status. These are all people who have legal status in the United States.
Now, they are doing a card trick to call them illegal aliens. They have legal status in the United States. They are not here illegally. They’ve shown themselves to the government. We know who they are, and Democrats basically said, “We’d like to undo everything you did in your attacks on Medicaid.”
And this was one part of it, but really the substance of their argument was to undo the massive cuts to the Medicaid program. So it is just false to say that it is covering illegal aliens. They’re not illegal aliens.
It is currently illegal, under federal law, for federal dollars to go to health care subsidies for people here illegally.
That is the No. 1 point to say about this, which is: The truth, is that — for those of us who were old enough to remember, and I have some battle scars over this issue, having worked on the legislation, there was a big, robust debate about whether people illegally here, illegal aliens, undocumented people could get access to the A.C.A.
There is a provision that says: By statute, you cannot receive health care — the premium tax credit cannot go to any illegal aliens, undocumented people, whatever you want to call them. That is illegal, and that is why they’ve had to do this mental gymnastics to transform people who are legally here into illegal aliens.
Those are two different words. They have two different meanings, and they’re just conglomerating them in order to make some shred of making a lie true. But it is still a lie.
We’ve been talking primarily about the Affordable Care Act private health insurance marketplaces, but when we started talking about the questions of immigrants of different forms, that gets you into Medicaid.
As you mentioned, a lot was changed in Medicaid. The expiring tax credits actually come from Democratic bills, right? These tax credits were set to expire in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Medicaid changes were in the O.B.B.B.A.
Talk me through the Medicaid changes.
This is the biggest seismic shift in health care in my 25 years of working on it — and in a negative way. The Republicans essentially put forward a transformation of the Medicaid program. They adopted a series of regulations that will mean that millions of people will lose health care.
They instituted work requirements, but those work requirements are, honestly, about so much paperwork that it just really becomes hard for people to keep their health insurance.
Yeah, you use the complexity of the paperwork to kick people off the programs. My wife, Annie Lowry, is writing a book on this. It’s called “The Time Tax.”
I know. I’m a great student of her work. We did a lot of work in the federal government to go the other way and make benefits easier. But that is kind of the hack. The hack is that they make it so complicated to access your benefits that people will lose their benefits.
This was a highly contested debate, during the consideration of the bill, but the fact has always been clear that states that have used these systems of complexity have lost coverage. Arkansas instituted work requirements with complicated paperwork, and lots and lots of people lost their health insurance.
You ask them to verify every month. The whole system is sort of designed to keep people out of health care.
Just to step back: I know there was a robust debate about the One Big Beautiful Bill, but the heart of that legislation was fundamentally — it’s a complicated tax bill — the truth of that legislation at its most base components was that, unlike any other legislation that has been passed by a Congress, at least in my life, the legislation itself provided a massive tax cut to the wealthiest, and it extended middle-class tax cuts, but its big innovation was large-scale tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, a lot of corporate tax cuts and cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.
Republicans really had this big argument about fraud, etc., but that was all just honestly — can I say “[expletive]” on this? It was just BS. It was just ridiculous.
The fundamentals are that Republicans have been trying to undo the expansion of the welfare state. Lots of people got health care coverage over the last decade, and they really think that we’re spending too much on that.
And that’s really, I think, why the legislation was so unpopular. There’s a lot of ways they can be in step or both parties are up for grabs, but I think Americans did not think that the big problem in America is that too many people have health care.
One reason that Americans didn’t think that is that Trump never runs saying that. He continuously runs saying he’s going to protect Medicare, he’s going to protect Medicaid, he’s going to fix the Affordable Care Act, give this country the health care it deserves.
And to a large extent, when I talk to congressional Democrats — at this moment, the Democratic Party brand is not shining, shall we say.
I think that’s fair. [Laughs.]
This is their big political opportunity. This is the issue that Americans care about that they also trust Democrats on. This is the issue where Trump is repeatedly betraying promises to people — saying he wouldn’t cut Medicaid and doing so, saying he would fix the Affordable Care Act and then allowing a gigantic premium spike to happen.
I had somebody who’s very involved in the Democratic effort to take back the House basically say to me that the most dangerous thing Trump is doing is his effort to corrupt the government to be an authoritarian tool. But the most effective tool Democrats have against him is health care policy. They believe that the way they’re going to win the House back is on health care.
Yeah. Look, there’s a fascinating marriage of convenience between the pro-welfare-state populace and the libertarians.
I think that this isn’t popular — not just because Donald Trump didn’t run on it but also because Donald Trump never talks about this. He never talks about the O.B.B.B.A. I knew we were winning this debate during the consideration of the bill. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where public opinion actually dictates how congressional leaders act. They sped up the debate because it was so unpopular.
But I think what’s really important to think about is how people hear these things. There are a lot of people who pay a lot of attention to politics. There are a lot of people who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. That has always been the case in the United States. We’ve always run elections that way.
And I think this is a really crucial part of this discussion, which is: In a world where lots of people are not paying attention to politics and they are pretty stressed out in their lives, what are the things that feel real in their lived experience?
I am genuinely petrified by what the president is doing to weaponize the U.S. military against cities. But I also think we have to acknowledge that a lot of people live in places that are not in cities. And they’re not paying attention to the news every day, and they’re struggling to get by — and it is totally legitimate. It is totally legitimate for that person to be pretty anxious about making ends meet and hearing about health care costs for them going up.
I think the truth of the country that we’re in right now — and maybe we wish everyone talked about one issue versus another — but people understand this cost-of-living problem.
What’s fascinating about America — but it’s not just America; it’s around the world. CAP just ran a conference with center-left leaders, progressive leaders from Western countries — Europe, Canada, Australia. And three years after 9 percent inflation in the United States, people care about cost of living today as much as they cared about it back then.
That says to me that there is an overall sense that people are feeling out of control of how they can afford their life. In that world, democracies mean leaders have to meet voters where they are.
There’s no referee. The voters win. This is an issue where I think there’s actually more opportunity.
The thing that’s so fundamentally amazing about the first eight months of Trump — I expected a lot of the authoritarian threat, and I am genuinely surprised by their creativity, but it is horrifying — but the thing that is most remarkable and among the things that is so different from the first four years of his administration is that he is actually getting away with hurting working-class people this time. His big legislation in the first four years that would’ve hurt working-class people was the repeal effort to undo the Affordable Care Act. And we stopped him. Democrats stopped him.
These eight months, he has passed legislation that will mean that working-class people lose their health care, utility rates will go up, and he has a tariff policy that means the price of goods will go up. And who faces that cost disproportionately? Working-class people.
We have to have alternatives for people. But what you talk about really matters, particularly when you’re in the opposition, and I think it is crucial that we talk about the pain that Trump and Republicans are delivering, having voted on it or delivered it through his executive actions on tariffs. They are delivering pain to working-class people every day, and we have to keep our eye on that ball.
One of the arguments that I made about a shutdown and that others made about a shutdown is that it’s an attentional event.
The problem Democrats have had is not that they don’t have a message. They have lots of messages, arguably too many messages. It’s that nobody cares what they’re saying because they don’t have power.
And the shutdown, what it’s already doing is forcing a debate. Turn on the news, and you see Johnson, and you see Schumer, and you see Jeffries, and you see Thune, and they’re talking about health insurance subsidies. They’re talking about the Democrats’ best issue.
We are devoting a full show to it here because there’s something happening on it. It’s not just out there as one of the million policy problems flitting about the ether as Trump sends the National Guard into cities.
Democrats have been very skittish about using the leverage they have. I think people don’t actually realize how much leverage they have not been using. They didn’t just skip the shutdown in March, but they’re also helping Republicans get cloture on the National Defense Authorization Act and all kinds of things.
They’re not throwing sand in the gears and creating crises as much as they could, because they’ve been quite frightened about, well, what do they get out of it? And what happens if Trump moves into a reprisal mode?
But one thing they get out of it is a modicum of control over attention, and then they actually have to win the argument. You can’t pick a bad argument and lose. It’s not going to help you. But already you see the Trump administration starting to take their own danger on health insurance subsidies seriously.
Nothing matters in politics if people don’t know about it. Nothing matters if people either can’t feel it or even if they are feeling it but there’s not the attention to tell them how to interpret what’s happening to them.
One thing the shutdown is doing, and it seems like it’s working, is shining light on this issue in particular — which is what Democrats, on some level, set out to achieve.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. I might offer an amendment, which is that I think the reason this is getting coverage is Democrats have leverage on the 60 votes.
Republicans, Democrats, we all live in a media ecosystem, and a challenge of it is that there is a lot of news created by the Trump administration. But also, if something feels like a fait accompli, it does not actually get that much attention.
An example is how Republicans essentially nuked the filibuster in the lead-up to the O.B.B.B.A., and we don’t have to get into the really hard-to-explain details, but they blew up the filibuster on being able to package nominees together.
Democrats basically didn’t go along. They blew up the filibuster, and no one in America knows about this. That might’ve been a big debate a year or two, three, four or five years ago in normal politics. But in a world in which Trump is threatening to send the National Guard into cities, it does seem like kind of a minutia.
I think the real issue here is having a fight over a major-scale issue and also having some sense that you could win the fight. And at a time when part of the Democratic brand is poor because people perceive it — even Democrats perceive it — as weak, that is why it is important for all leaders within the party to use opportunities where they have real leverage to speak out.
And just to say: Leadership is a social contract. Wherever it is, it’s a social contract. It’s like, “I’m going to follow you, and you are going to protect me or look out for me or do something for me.”
We’ve talked about some of the authoritarian threat in the country and a real sense of anxiety and fear among Democrats about how much our country is transforming in our eyes. And it is not unreasonable, in that moment when you are scared, to look for your leaders to be strong.
I think that is also part of the politics of all of this. Here’s an opportunity for Democrats to stand up for — not just willy-nilly something that helps them — but something that actually helps the American people in a way that every voter can understand, as you can see from this poll. It’s not an intellectual exercise about congressional powers versus Article I versus Article II versus Article III.
It is a real debate about people’s lives, and that is an opportunity that has not come before and may not come again before the midterms.
The Trump administration’s response on this, separate from their messaging, is: You think a shutdown is leverage for you? No, it’s leverage for us.
You probably saw that Trump tweeted an A.I.-generated music video of the Office of Management and Budget director and, as he put it, of Project 2025 fame, Russell Vought.
Nice of him to acknowledge, a year after the election.
Yes. He tweeted this music video of Vought as the Grim Reaper.
Clip: “Russ Vought is the Reaper.”
The idea is that the shutdown gives Trump and Vought powers to remake the federal government in some wholly new way, that they can do things during a shutdown that they couldn’t otherwise do, and Democrats should fear what they’re going to do.
What powers does it give them?
Legally, it doesn’t give them more powers. Legally, it’s actually supposed to give them less power because it’s illegal to fire people during a shutdown while they’re furloughed. That is actually in the law. Now, I appreciate that law is sort of questionable with the president, but I think there’s two things going on here.
One, Trump uses fear as an asymmetric asset, right? I mean, this Grim Reaper meme is exactly him trying to get Democrats to give in out of fear. And I just think Trump is like any other bully, and the more you fear at his discretion, the more you’re going to do what he wants, which is pre-cower.
That’s the power of bullying. It makes you do things that the bully wants without him actually having to throw that punch.
But I also think there’s something just completely different about this, which is — I think this is like an underrated part of all this — we have never had a negotiation over the budget between Congress and the president take place like this while the president is fully committed to unilaterally closing down agencies. I think the American people blame Trump because he’s been closing down agencies or trying to close down elements of this government for eight months.
I think the public just sees everything. They’re not deciphering news separately. They see all this against a backdrop. I pay a lot of attention to news — do we even know if the Department of Education is fully functional right now?
I mean, he tried to close the agency. Then a court reopened the agency, then they kind of lost a decision. It’s really hard to keep track of what’s open and closed. And honestly, in a government shutdown, it feels like it’s just a matter of degree, not a matter of existence, of whether these agencies are working or not.
Fundamentally, I don’t think you should give in to the bully threatening people. It’s kind of horrifying, and we shouldn’t reward this kind of behavior.
But also, I understand why people care. They care about human beings, and I do, too. But he’s going to get worse if he’s not stopped. This is the other part of all of this. We’re in Month 8. This is an opportunity to push back.
What is really crazy and terrible is that Republican House and Senate members have lost power to the president. This is a system that Trump has hacked. Our founding fathers expected congressional leaders to care about their power. The idea of separation of powers is that while the president might have a lot of power, members of Congress of both parties would jealously guard their power.
That is what he has hacked. He has hacked scaring his own members into ceding power to him. What really should happen here is that Republicans who actually care should secretly hope that Democrats win this debate so they can get back to being — I mean, I just wonder every day, “Do you look in the mirror and have dignity?” [Laughs.] I just wonder what these people think they’re doing,
The specific argument that they’re making about what Vought can do is that they can do mass firings. And there are two things worth talking about with that. One is, as you say, that is facially, under the law, illegal.
Now, they’ve done a lot of illegal things. Supreme Court seems to be relatively —
Eh. They’re relatively eh.
Yeah. Relatively eh about things you would’ve thought were illegal. But there’s that, and this would be pretty flagrantly illegal.
Mm-hm.
The other, though, is a more fundamental conceptual question — this idea that destroying a federal government that you run is a good move for you. They’re treating the federal government, which they are in charge of, as a hostage that Democrats need to stop them from shooting. And to be clear, I do not want to see the federal government shot.
Usually, when you’re the president and you run the executive branch, you don’t want the executive branch to fall apart. And if you’ve been listening to some of Trump’s cabinet appointees, they don’t seem to want their agencies gutted. I believe this is why DOGE functionally stopped.
I guess you could just try to attack things only Democrats like in government. I think that would be illegal. But I’m curious how you think about that, because my view is that if they had wanted to continue gutting the federal government, they would have. They have the power to do it.
The fact that Vought has not been doing much more than he’s been doing suggests to me that the Trump administration actually has not wanted to do all these things.
At a certain point, they’re running the federal government, and they need it to work for them, and a lot of this is smoke and mirrors. They would be shooting at their own administrative body now, as opposed to just something that’s the Democrats’ job to protect and manage.
Look, I have been on the other side of this. I was in the White House in the last four years when we were worried about Republicans shutting down the government. And the truth is, I think people generally think that the president is in charge. So the president is always worried — or should always be worried — about owning a shutdown.
But also, when you have a shutdown, it really matters what happens in the first 24, 36, 48 hours. If you’re thinking rationally about this — this is what I think is so interesting — they basically threaten to have the firings. And so the moment that you should really want to scare everybody would’ve been Thursday.
Well, that’s another piece of this. The other thing that they have been doing is freezing money for projects in blue states. It speaks to the irony here of Democrats pushing a shutdown to try to protect tax credits that help red states and Republicans responding by freezing infrastructure money in blue states.
I’ve been talking to Democrats about this, and universally what they’re saying to me is that it is uniting their side and hardening their resolve. I think there’s a bit of an analogy to the tariffs here. Trump has used tariffs to break a bunch of other countries and try to bring them closer in line with what he wanted.
And in trying to do that, say, to Canada, he united Canadians and destroyed the political career of the more Trump-like, right-wing figure who was expected to be the next Canadian prime minister. That’s, in large part, how Mark Carney got elected. In Brazil it has united a lot of support around Lula.
When people feel that you are punishing them unfairly, even if it is hurting them — New York does not want to see money for the Second Avenue subway frozen — it tends to turn them against you. People don’t enjoy being bullied.
There’s these two levels, right? Normally, what the president does during a shutdown, when the shutdown is pushed by the opposition party, is say: Listen, I’m a thoughtful, reasonable person here. I would love to negotiate over anything. What I want to do is turn the lights on, and I’m not going to let you hold the federal government hostage.
And instead, Trump is saying: I am so excited to use this shutdown as cover to push an extremist agenda I wouldn’t even have done three weeks ago. I’m going to freeze a bunch of money from blue states, and I’m not really going to negotiate with you.
It’s not a way of deflecting blame.
No, and I think people sniff the stuff out. It’s really interesting mentioning Carney. Like, look around the world. Who are the leaders who are actually popular in their countries? Carney, Lula, Prime Minister Albanese in Australia — these are people who are actually gaining in popularity because they’re standing up to Trump.
What’s so fascinating about this moment is that Trump basically has a modus operandi that has worked against a series of institutions over these last eight months.
It is to bully and scare you and to use the power of the federal government against them in a world in which media networks are caving, law firms are caving, some universities are caving. This has been a very effective strategy for him to scare the [expletive] out of people.
And I think the truth of it, though, is that bullies work by bullying. If you are not bullied by the bully, then half of their job is gone. The irony of this whole situation is that he has a way of working, which is to try and scare you, and if you just hold firm and let it pass, it will be OK.
I’ve heard from people in agencies who are worried about getting fired, but they think it’s more important for Democrats to hold firm to Trump because they know if he is allowed to get away with this, it will only get worse.
It’s also a longtime strategy that Trump’s various opponents have used against him to provoke him into overreaction.
Yes. This is a great example, to me, of an overreaction: He closes the Second Avenue subway. He is closing all these construction projects that affect New York. I think the idea was to punish Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, in order to maximize pain. But then a variety of these projects affect New Jersey as well — Gateway Tunnel, other projects, so it’s not just limited to New York City. And then, of course, that raises the question of: What does everyone think about that?
Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for governor, immediately attacked the president for unnecessarily closing down this project, stopping this project.
And then the question went to the Republican candidate, and he basically said: No one’s asking me about this. He really is avoiding saying: Donald Trump — done something wrong.
Even though, I think, there’s 95,000 jobs at stake. And so I do think it creates interesting counterpressures in ways that perhaps Republicans have not thought through.
It gets to this question of the shutdown. A shutdown over time will cause pain. What Trump is trying to do with the grants and the funding is accelerate the pain caused to blue states faster than a shutdown naturally would. If Vought begins laying off vast amounts of the federal work force, maybe that would cause pain faster than things otherwise would.
But we’re pretty early in this. The thing that will happen is that functions of the government, if there’s not a deal, will begin to either degrade or to shut down. You might not have air traffic controllers getting paid, and you begin to have flight delays. You might have national parks close. Usually you try to stay out of the way of that and blame the other party for it.
Talk to me a bit about what that might look like if this week there’s no deal, if next week there’s no deal — if we’re starting to look at a shutdown of four weeks, five weeks, six weeks. When this stops just being a media story about a negotiation and begins to be something that’s happening to Americans, what will they feel?
There will be stories about people not being able to get passports as easily and stories about the national parks, and there will definitely be stories about veterans’ services and things like that.
I’ve been in various shutdowns, but there’s two issues in people’s heads: What does the government do, broadly? And then, if Democrats are capable of holding on to this line — which I think they will be — there’ll be another pain in people’s heads, as well, which is premium shocks.
These are two things, and right now what’s been really interesting about this shutdown is that there haven’t been as many stories as we usually get in a shutdown about problems in the first couple of days — in part because, I think, there might be a little bit more people inured to those kinds of stories, given the world we’re in. But there will be more and more stories like that.
Everyone sees things online. The argument of Republicans for the last year has been, “We should do DOGE on steroids because the federal government is useless” — and now they’re the big champions of keeping it open? I just think, at a fundamental level, people understand that this is sort of [expletive].
The whole thing this debate comes down to is Democrats being like, “Let me help you. Help me help you. You don’t want these premium tax credits?” And if I were Thune and Johnson, I would know Trump wants to make a deal at some point. He’s not going to live like this forever.
I’m sure he is much more focused on the National Guard in cities, but fundamentally his voters are going to be hurt by this in a world where his economic approval numbers are already low and cost-of-living approval numbers are already low. Anyone rational in the White House will know that they want to make a deal eventually.
Do you think he’s going to be so loyal to Johnson and Thune to not pull the rug from underneath them? No. My take on all of this is, maybe before we get the mass firings, we will get a deal.
Do you have any sense yet of the outlines of what that deal might look like? Do you think that is clear? People talk a lot about how Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, has become a key go-between with the Republicans. Are you hearing outlines of something taking shape or not yet?
What I hear is that there are a lot of conversations but that none of them are engaged with Thune, and you have to engage the leader.
He is holding on to his posture of really not negotiating on this. And maybe things will change. I think Republicans had a lot more confidence last Wednesday that Democrats would fold. I think they expected the Republican message machine to work on immigration, which it has not.
People are not buying this immigration debate. Two to one, Republicans even think this debate is around health care and not immigration. I think they went to their go-to of obscuring people about illegal immigrants, and it hasn’t worked.
The coverage really still is on health care, and again, it’s going to get worse and worse and worse on health care because people are going to get these shocking premium hikes in the mail. And then people will have to decide. People will decide not to get coverage. These are going to be stories we all live with.
The challenge here, just to be honest, is Mike Johnson basically saying he’s not going to take up this legislation. He doesn’t even have the House in this week. How seriously are they taking this? It really has made it difficult for moderate Democrats to say, “Yes, we can negotiate” because whatever deal they strike with Thune has to get agreed to by Johnson. Otherwise, what are they all doing?
Fundamentally, this will come down to Trump.
Then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
My absolute top recommendation is “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. The essential theme of the book is that inclusive political systems create inclusive economic systems and exclusive political systems create extractive economic systems — which, to boil it down, is saying that democracy is good for capitalism and markets and people’s economic success and that maybe what we describe as oligarchy is really bad for economic growth, and it is why countries tend to fail. I think it is a description of our history but also a warning sign about our future.
“The Sirens’ Call” by Chris Hayes. You’ve talked a lot about this, that the most important element of politics is attention. We talk a lot in politics about political leaders’ biography, geography and ideology. But their ability to convince people of their position and where they want to take the country and defend against attacks and have a vision for the future depends on how much people want to hear and listen and be led by them. It really is all a function of people first being willing to pay attention to what you say. That is a really interesting understanding of the world.
And then “End Times” by Peter Turchin, which does follow a little bit on “Why Nations Fail,” but it gives a sense of why we are in this moment itself and what explains the Trump era, based on how people have felt stuck for a long time. And it makes me think about how we need a political system that is answering more fundamental questions than perhaps it has so far.
Neera Tanden, thank you very much.
Thanks so much for having me.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.