It takes a special kind of government to run a shutdown like a start-up.
A federal judge just told the Trump administration—again—that firing thousands of workers in the middle of a shutdown isn’t “streamlining.” It’s illegal. But if you squint hard enough and forget about laws, ethics, and human beings, you can almost admire the logic. What better way to prove that “government doesn’t work” than by literally firing the government?
The Trump Doctrine of Management: If It Moves, Fire It
Judge Susan Illston didn’t just block Trump’s mass firings; she delivered the bureaucratic equivalent of a slap on the wrist with a law book. Her ruling from the bench read like the world’s driest horror story: the administration “took advantage of the lapse in government spending to assume that all bets are off.” Translation—shutdown equals purge.
More than 4,000 federal workers were reportedly pink-slipped across agencies from Commerce to Education, Energy to HHS, Homeland Security to Treasury. Entire offices gutted mid-pay period. You can imagine the White House celebration: JD Vance smiling awkwardly beside Russ Vought, Trump declaring it “the biggest workforce reduction in history, maybe ever, people are saying so.”
Except the judge wasn’t amused. Because, fun fact, there are laws for this sort of thing. Reduction in Force—RIF for short—requires justification, documentation, and cause. What the administration offered instead was vibes, vengeance, and a PowerPoint titled Drain the Swamp 2.0: Now With Real People.
You Can’t Spell ‘Reform’ Without ‘RIF’
The administration insists this was all about efficiency, not ideology. Sure, they only fired employees represented by the largest federal union, the American Federation of Government Employees, and sure, every public comment from Trump, Vance, and Vought framed it as a “necessary correction to Democrat bloat.” But no, definitely not political.
When DOJ attorneys were asked in court if the RIFs were legal, they replied, “Not today, your honor.” Which is a bold strategy for a department whose only job is law. That’s like your doctor saying, “We’re not doing medicine today.”
The government’s legal position seemed to boil down to: “We haven’t really decided who we’re firing, but we already fired them, and also it might not count.” The administrative version of Schrödinger’s workforce—simultaneously employed and unemployed until observed by a judge.
The Great Government Diet
Trump’s supporters call it “lean government.” It’s a beautiful phrase, if you’re into corporate euphemisms for collapse.
You can imagine the internal logic: What if we ran America like a hedge fund? Fire the NOAA scientists, outsource FEMA to Elon, privatize air traffic control, and hand HUD over to whoever sells the most timeshares in Palm Beach.
The man who once bankrupted casinos has now applied the same visionary thinking to the federal government. The shutdown isn’t a crisis—it’s a business opportunity. Who needs a functioning Department of Education when you can just livestream homeschooling tips from Truth Social? Why maintain the Treasury when you can mint NFTs of the national debt?
Every agency becomes a brand, every firing a press release. Governance as content.
The Shutdown as Performance Art
Fifteen days in, the shutdown has become its own genre of political theater. The Capitol’s lights are dimmed, the cafeterias are closed, and thousands of federal employees are checking job boards that say “Loading…” because the Department of Labor’s website runs on a furloughed server.
Meanwhile, Trump is on camera promising that the chaos is “part of the plan.” He’s right—just not in the way he thinks. This isn’t fiscal discipline. It’s sabotage dressed as reform, a managerial Hunger Games where the prize is survival.
It’s one thing to play politics with budgets. It’s another to weaponize the very machinery of employment to punish your opposition. The judge called it politically motivated. The rest of us might call it what it is: fascism by HR memo.
Russ Vought’s Do-It-Yourself Government Kit
The architect of this bureaucratic massacre, OMB Director Russ Vought, has been quietly constructing the most ideologically purified government since the Nixon era. His vision: a workforce loyal not to institutions, but to the man. Under Project 2025, every agency would be gutted and rebuilt in Trump’s image—a mirror maze of loyalty tests and layoff notices.
Vought has said the quiet part out loud: “Personnel is policy.” Which, when translated from Heritage Foundation-speak, means “We’ll fire anyone who reads books we don’t like.”
You can almost picture the reimagined federal agencies:
- The Environmental Protection Agency, now rebranded as the “Energy Liberation Bureau.”
- The Department of Education, merged with the Church of What’s Left of It.
- The CDC, renamed the “Patriots’ Wellness Network,” dedicated to proving Tylenol causes autism.
Each division staffed by the same six interns who run Trump’s social media accounts. Efficiency achieved.
The Courts Step In (Again)
Judge Illston’s ruling was not subtle. She essentially told the administration, “You’re not kings, you’re clerks, and clerks follow rules.” Her injunction halts all further RIF notices and nullifies those issued since October 10. She even used the phrase “laws still apply,” which, in 2025, counts as a revolutionary statement.
But the administration’s reaction has been predictably performative. Within hours, Trump was reportedly drafting a post for X declaring the decision “DEEP STATE ACTIVISM” and calling Judge Illston “another radical from California, bad for business, bad for America, bad hair.”
JD Vance went on television to argue that “lazy bureaucrats” are the real threat to democracy. Russ Vought released a statement saying the firings were “necessary restructuring.” And somewhere in the DOJ, Elizabeth Hedges is still refusing to answer questions about legality “today or any other day.”
The Party of Small Government (and Smaller Morality)
This is what small government looks like in practice: a bonfire of paychecks. The same party that rails against socialism just executed a mass layoff that would make Karl Marx blush.
It’s the conservative dream realized—a workforce so small it can’t contradict you. The administrative state reduced to a single printer in Mar-a-Lago.
They call it “draining the swamp,” but at this point, they’ve drained the drinking water too.
The New Political Economy of Cruelty
To Trump’s base, this is red meat. Government workers are convenient villains—faceless, salaried, allegedly elite. Never mind that many of them are veterans, scientists, food-safety inspectors, or the people who ensure Social Security checks arrive on time. In MAGA mythology, “bureaucrat” is code for “enemy.”
It’s not policy. It’s psychology. You create a grievance economy where cruelty is currency. Fire the experts, blame the chaos on the victims, and call it liberation.
This is what fascism looks like when it wears a necktie instead of a uniform.
When Government Becomes a Game Show
Watching the shutdown unfold feels less like a crisis and more like a reality show called Who Wants to Keep Their Job?
Each episode, Trump strolls into a press briefing and announces, “We’re cutting more waste—Education, HUD, some parts of the Pentagon, we’ll see how it plays out.” Then he looks directly into the camera: “Some very fine people are getting very fine severance packages, folks.”
Contestants—sorry, employees—wait nervously at home for their agencies to vanish. Every tweet is a potential pink slip. Every court ruling is a plot twist. The stakes couldn’t be higher, but the tone never changes: scripted chaos performed for the base that demands more of it.
The Democrats Try a Plot Twist
Now, Democrats are floating a new shutdown demand: reversing Trump’s mass firings. It’s a strange moment when the opposition party’s central legislative goal is to stop the president from literally firing the government.
The irony, of course, is that the people laid off are the ones who would normally process the reversal paperwork. You can’t reinstate what’s already been deleted.
But at least someone’s fighting. Because if the pattern holds, this administration won’t stop until the only remaining civil servant is the guy changing the batteries in Trump’s teleprompter.
The Absurdity of Governance by Chaos
This shutdown—now on Day 15—has already outlasted the attention span of most cable networks. It’s become background noise, a kind of ambient dysfunction. But the consequences are real: delayed disaster aid, frozen research grants, expired childcare funding, and the slow bleed of morale among the people who still believe public service is something worth doing.
The cruel genius of it all is that the pain is designed to be invisible. The workers fired don’t make headlines; the services they provide do. When the next hurricane response falters, the administration will shrug and say, “See? Government doesn’t work.”
And then they’ll fire the remaining meteorologists for complaining about it.