Schumer’s Shutdown Is Empowering Trump To Drain The Swamp

Every day the federal government shutdown drags on, Sen. Chuck Schumer looks more like a man without a message and a rebel with a losing cause.

He’s shouting, “No kings!” into every microphone he can find, trying to sound like a revolutionary to appease his base voters. But he is the one putting the crown on Donald Trump’s head, handing him the very powers he warned about just months ago.

Back in March, Schumer said: “A shutdown gives Trump and his minions keys to the city and the country … complete freedom as to what parts of the government to fund and what parts not.”

He was onto something. Now Trump is using those keys to unlock one of his biggest campaign promises: draining the swamp and taking power back from Washington’s permanent ruling class. Conservatives have always wanted to do this, but thanks to Schumer, it is finally happening.

The Washington swamp is deep and crowded. The federal government is the largest employer in the United States, with more than 2.4 million federal employees, and they are mainly concentrated in the Washington, D.C., area.

These bureaucrats receive nearly double the compensation on average that private sector workers get, and they are overwhelmingly Democrat, making D.C. much bluer than any state in the union. Federal jobs cost taxpayers $384 billion each year, helping to put four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States in the D.C. area. And the higher concentration of money and Democrats has only accelerated the bloat.

In just the last five years, the federal government added more than 200,000 jobs and nearly doubled the cost of the federal workforce. Yet despite this growth in the number of federal workers, the public’s trust in the federal government remains near an all-time low.

Donald Trump ran for office as a political outsider, a successful businessman who became the only president who had never served in government or the military before. He echoed the people’s concerns that we had ceded too much power to unelected bureaucrats and pledged to “drain the swamp.”

Since returning to the Oval Office in January, President Trump has revisited some innovative ideas that he pioneered during his first term and continued to employ new tactics to take back power from the bureaucracy. The president has begun to convert some career bureaucrat jobs — protected by unions and essentially unaccountable to anyone — into political appointee jobs, which are at-will, like the vast majority of jobs in this country. With a few strokes of his Sharpie, the president initiated the elimination of the Department of Education and our foreign aid bureaucracy, eliminating 3,000 federal jobs. 

Shortly after his inauguration, the president’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) offered an unprecedented buyout to nearly all federal employees and got more than 100,000 acceptances that are now going into effect. But all of these historic actions were just the beginning. Now the president’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce have gone into overdrive, and it is all thanks to Democrats in Congress.

Since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, Trump and his team have set about making Schumer’s worst fears a reality. President Trump is using his authority under a government shutdown to keep the most essential parts of government open while keeping the most wasteful parts closed.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has announced 1,300 layoffs at the IRS, an agency Democrats vastly expanded under President Biden. And thousands more federal workers have been laid off in the past few weeks. With every passing day that Schumer blocks a vote to fund the government, Trump can continue handing out the pink slips and saving taxpayers millions of dollars.

The good news waiting for recently drained federal employees is that there are more than 7 million job openings in America today — the private-sector jobs that contribute to funding the government if Chuck Schumer ever opens it again. Most talented and hard-working federal workers can turn their efforts toward making the economy even stronger, not bogging it down with regulations, inefficiencies, or partisan activities.

As the Schumer Shutdown drags on, the layoffs continue. The dilemma facing Democrats is this: Either reopen the government or sit back and watch the president continue to remake the federal government using the powers they gave him.

If elected Democrats keep siding with the bureaucrats over the majority of the American people, they may be the federal employees that voters give the pink slips to next November.

Liesel Crocker is a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.