The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: mystery-ak on January 11, 2019, 02:38:09 pm
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Trump’s New Shutdown World
Kimberley A. Strassel January 10, 2019
This weekend the federal shutdown becomes the longest in history—and yet, and yet, the sky has not fallen. Meet the team that has allowed the Trump White House to hold out for so long, and in the process forever altered future shutdown fights.
Across the street from the Oval Office, an only somewhat merry band of budget lawyers labor on one priority: making this event as painless as possible. That was the order from President Trump when the government closed, and the Office of Management and Budget was ready. Acting White...
A girl outside the shuttered National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., Jan. 2.Photo: andrew caballero-reynolds/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
This weekend the federal shutdown becomes the longest in history—and yet, and yet, the sky has not fallen. Meet the team that has allowed the Trump White House to hold out for so long, and in the process forever altered future shutdown fights.
Across the street from the Oval Office, an only somewhat merry band of budget lawyers labor on one priority: making this event as painless as possible. That was the order from President Trump when the government closed, and the Office of Management and Budget was ready. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had spent months as OMB director gearing up for a stoppage. Acting Director Russ Vought was all in. And OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta and his small legal team (those not furloughed) has spent every day since putting out fires.
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Why can't the shutdown be used as the impetus for a serious reduction in the size and scope of the federal government? I hope it goes on for years. Why is the government hiring "nonessential" people to begin with?
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Why can't the shutdown be used as the impetus for a serious reduction in the size and scope of the federal government?
Probably for the same reasons the previous shutdowns weren't. Namely, because smaller government wasn't on anyone's serious agenda from the White House to Congress on down; it wasn't even really a topic in the 2016 and 2018 elections; and, because these days people think of government as something with which to beat their actual or alleged adversaries into submission (when not suckling at their own preferred teats) rather than what it really is, the nation's single largest public nuisance.