Trump Sure Picked Some Convenient Projects to Exclude From Shutdown

President Donald Trump intends to shield his sweeping immigration enforcement operations from the effects of the government shutdown, as well as other key facets of his policy agenda, Politico reported Wednesday.

Through a series of interviews with former and current White House officials and analysis of agency documents, Politico learned what programs and offices Trump plans to keep intact—and spoiler alert, they’re not the essential government programs that Americans rely on. 

The Department of Homeland Security expanded the number of employees it is permitted to retain during a shutdown by 2,300, and has plans to keep 95 percent of its total employees in the office during the shutdown. Two years ago, it was only allowed to keep 88 percent. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, charged with carrying out Trump’s sweeping raids for undocumented immigrants and extrajudicial deportations, will continue to operate without interruption, two administration officials told Politico. 

“ICE will be fine during a shutdown,” one of the administration officials told Politico. “Most of what ICE does will continue.” Border Control would also remain mostly operational. 

In previous shutdowns, the Commerce Department and U.S. Trade Representative’s office were deemed non-essential—but this time, both have announced their intention to continue working on Trump’s economic policy agenda. 

Commerce has indicated that it will continue to allow import licensing for steel and aluminum, which was not a protected activity under the agency’s 2023 shutdown plan. The USTR will keep administration tariff programs running using 60 percent of its workforce, compared to the 40 percent it would have retained under its 2024 plan. 

NASA’s Artemis moonshot program will also continue to receive funding, as will the Department of the Interior’s processing of applications for drilling permits.  

Meanwhile, Trump intends to target Democrats—and punish Americans—by stripping federal programs that actually help people.

That means hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be sent home from the Social Security Administration, the Health and Human Services Department, the Department of Education, and other federal agencies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has suspended operations, and the Federal Drug Administration has halted its long-term food safety initiatives and pre-market safety reviews of novel animal food ingredients. 

Additionally, if you are one of the estimated 200,000 Americans who filed for an extension on filing your tax returns, the deadline is still October 15—but if you have any questions about that, you may struggle to get a hold of an actual IRS employee in their office. 

On the first day of the government shutdown, Vice President JD Vance tried to claim that it’s all the fault of Democrats for wanting to give free health care to undocumented immigrants. 

“This is a Democrat talking point. They say we’re not actually trying to give health care benefits to illegal aliens. And here’s why it’s not true,” Vance said on Fox News on Wednesday. “There are two Biden-era programs that explicitly gave the taxpayer health care money to illegal aliens that we turned off when President Trump took over in January.… The Democrats want to turn it back on. And in their initial proposal, the first thing that they put out to reopen the government, they actually turned that money for health care benefits for illegal aliens back on. So it’s not something that we made up. It’s not a talking point. It is in the text of the bill that they initially gave to us to reopen the government.” 

In reality, Democrats are fighting to reverse Trump’s Medicaid cuts and extend Affordable Care Act tax subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year and would cause health care premiums to rise for millions of Americans.

And the text of Democrats’ proposal doesn’t say at all what Vance claims it does, as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out. 

“That is an outright lie. You can read the text for yourself; the Medicaid section starts on page 55,” he wrote on X. “There is nothing in there AT ALL about ‘free healthcare’ for undocumented immigrants. Vance is just making that up COMPLETELY.”

Some on the right responded to Reichlin-Melnick by bringing up the fact that undocumented people would get treatment in an emergency room, cruelly conflating Medicare and Medicaid with the emergency medical services every Medicare-participating hospital is required to give under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986. 

“If you get hit by a car, they don’t check your papers before saving your life. That’s not going to change,” Melnick continued. “Again, absolutely nothing in either the GOP Medicaid cuts passed earlier this year or the Democrats’ demand to reverse those cuts has anything at all to do with EMTALA, the law which requires hospitals to treat people who arrive with emergency medical needs.”

And yet the vice president’s rhetoric went unchallenged live, as the GOP continues to spread misinformation to justify its slash-and-burn funding bill while pointing the blame for the shutdown at Democrats.  

On Tuesday evening, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV spoke out against anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bellicose rhetoric.

At an unusual gathering of military leaders earlier that day, Hegseth had told the top brass to be “prepared for war, not for defense,” while espousing the use of “overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy” and promising to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”

Speaking to reporters in Italian, Leo called Hegseth’s rhetoric “worrying,” per the Catholic News Agency, “because it shows each time an increase in tensions.” Citing Hegseth’s change in job title from “secretary of defense” to “secretary of war,” the pope said, “Let’s hope it is only a way of speaking.”

The pontiff also discussed Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s decision to present a lifetime achievement award to outgoing Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who represents Illinois and is a Catholic, but whose support of legal abortion stirred conservative backlash against his announced honor. (Durbin ultimately opted to decline the award.)

“I’m not terribly familiar with the particular case,” Leo said in English when asked about the controversy. “I think that it’s very important to look at the overall work that a senator has done during, if I’m not mistaken, 40 years of service in the United States Senate.”

The pope noted that some people claim to be “pro-life” while failing to extend that sentiment to other issues.

“Someone who says, ‘I am against abortion,’ but says, ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he observed. “Someone who says that, ‘I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

While Leo didn’t name names, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance fall squarely into this category, as professed pro-lifers whose administration’s policies on the death penalty and immigration are anything but Christian.

Ethics be damned, the Trump administration is blatantly pinning the government shutdown on Democrats.

An email issued to federal workers Tuesday left little room for doubt about how the executive branch wanted to frame the congressional failure.

“President [Donald] Trump opposes a government shutdown, and strongly supports the enactment of H.R. 5371, which is a clean Continuing Resolution to fund the government through November 21,” the email, which was obtained by HuffPost, stated. “Unfortunately, Democrats are blocking this Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Senate due to unrelated policy demands.”

The email was received by employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration, reported HuffPost. Leaders of those same agencies sent out the email.

That kind of language is in violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, according to ethics experts. It could also violate the Hatch Act, which is designed to limit partisan messaging from federal employees.

But it hasn’t been the only instance in which the Trump administration has ignored long-standing presidential principles in order for Donald Trump to get his way.

The official White House website featured similar messages Wednesday. A banner atop the page reads: “Democrats have shut down the government,” followed by a timer tracking the amount of time it’s been since both parties failed to reach an agreement to continue funding the country.

Above that, an animated banner reads, “Democrat Shutdown: Democrats in Their Own Words.” That banner links out to another White House page titled “Live News” that features a running feed of edited comments from top Democratic lawmakers about the continuing resolution. (To be clear, the feed is not live, and it does not feature news.)

The Department of Housing and Urban Development showed a similar banner on its web page Tuesday, attacking the “radical left” for refusing a funding plan that would advance Trump’s agenda.

“The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands,” the notice read. “The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.”

Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told HuffPost Tuesday that it was “hard to imagine a worse message from a government agency” than the one delivered by HUD.

“But this is certainly consistent with an administration that makes enemies lists,” Sherman told the outlet.

Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened that he would weaponize a government shutdown against Democrats by having his White House budget director, Russell Vought, slash “things they like.”

The shutdown came overnight, and on Wednesday morning, Vought announced plans to freeze funds appropriated toward infrastructure projects in the state represented by the two top-ranking congressional Democrats.

On X, Vought said that “roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold,” specifically naming the Hudson Tunnel project and Second Avenue subway.

The Hudson Tunnel project is a plan to construct new and improved rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey, expanding service along the country’s busiest rail route. The Second Avenue subway is planned to connect a station in East Harlem, in an area that has been a “subway desert” for more than 85 years, to one in Lower Manhattan.

Vought said the funds are being withheld to ensure they are not being used for diversity, equity, and inclusion purposes, though he did not immediately elaborate on the purported relationship between the two key transit infrastructure projects and the right-wing bugbear that is DEI.

It’s difficult to interpret Vought’s choice as anything but an attempt to punish Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both of New York, who are the minority leaders in the House and Senate, respectively.