The Latest: Trump uses government shutdown to dole out firings and punishment

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President Donald Trump has seized on the government shutdown as an opportunity to reshape the federal workforce and punish detractors, by threatening mass firings of workers and suggesting “irreversible” cuts to programs important to Democrats.

Rather than simply furlough employees, as is usually done during any lapse of funds, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said layoffs were “imminent.” The Office of Management and Budget announced it was putting on hold roughly $18 billion of infrastructure funds for New York’s subway and Hudson Tunnel projects — in the hometown of the Democratic leaders of the U.S. House and Senate.

Thursday is day two of the shutdown, and already the dial is turned high. The aggressive approach coming from the Trump administration is what certain lawmakers and budget observers feared if Congress, which has the responsibility to pass legislation to fund government, failed to do its work and relinquished control to the White House.

Here's the latest:

If you’ve been in Washington long enough, you’ve most likely argued both sides of a shutdown. Both parties have used the threat of shutdowns to force a policy outcome and both sides have decried the other for doing the same. Nobody likes a shutdown, but each side insists the American people are on their side — whether their side is supporting a shutdown or not.

“Everybody just makes the mistake of believing in the righteousness of their positions, and it blinds them to the reality of shutdowns,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to House Speakers John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Paul Ryan, R-Wis. “It’s a political messaging exercise framed as a negotiating tactic, but there’s very little evidence that it really serves a policymaking purpose. It is more just a platform to talk about what’s important to you.”

▶ Read more about how both parties have used shutdown threats

When the government shut down in 2018, a nonprofit interceded to fund a bare-bones crew to keep one of Mississippi’s most visited cultural attractions operating. Now the group is committed to doing that for Vicksburg National Military Park once again.

The hilly Civil War battlefield where soldiers fought for control of the Mississippi River in 1863 reopened Thursday thanks to a commitment from the Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park and Campaign to pay $2,000 a day to keep it open during the current shutdown.

“For us it is primarily and first and foremost an issue of protection of the park,” executive director Bess Averett said of the site, home to more than 18,000 graves of veterans from six wars and a few former park employees. “During shutdowns or times when the park is not staffed, it’s really vulnerable to vandalism and relic hunters.”

The National Park Service’s contingency plan allows parks to enter into agreements with states, Native American tribes, local governments or other groups willing to donate to keep the sites open.

▶ Read more about National Parks and the shutdown

The EPA was already reeling from massive staff cuts and dramatic shifts in priority and policy. The government shutdown raises new questions about how it can carry out its founding mission of protecting America’s health and environment with little more than skeletal staff and funding.

In Trump’s second term, it has leaned hard into an agenda of deregulation and facilitating the president’s boosting of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to meet what he has called an energy emergency.

Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy official under President Bill Clinton, said it’s natural to worry that a shutdown will lead “the worst polluters” to treat it as a chance to dump toxic pollution without getting caught.

“Nobody will be holding polluters accountable” while the EPA is shut down, said Symons, now a senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network.

▶ Read more about the EPA and the shutdown

The president and first lady Melania Trump are dining Thursday night with JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the vice president lives.

It’s a rare outing out in Washington for the president for dinner.

U.S. stocks edged up to more records as technology stocks kept rising and as Wall Street kept ignoring the government shutdown.

The S&P 500 added 0.1% to its all-time high set the day before, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 79 points, or 0.2%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.4%. Both also hit records.

Thursdays on Wall Street typically have investors reacting to the latest weekly tally of U.S. workers applying for unemployment benefits. But D.C.’s shutdown meant this week’s report on jobless claims has been delayed. An even more consequential report, Friday’s monthly tally of jobs created and destroyed across the economy, will likely also not arrive on schedule.

So far the U.S. stock market has looked past such data delays. Shutdowns have tended not to hurt the economy or stock market much, and the thinking is that this one could be similar, even if Trump has threatened large-scale firings.

A growing number of Americans’ routine interactions with the federal government this week have been met with messaging that is far more partisan than the straightforward alerts that typically grace agency websites during shutdowns. Some traditionally apolitical agencies are using their official channels to spread a coordinated political message: It’s the Democrats’ fault.

The rhetoric, popping up in bright-red webpage banners, email autoreplies and social media posts, lays blame on the political party that is out of power in Washington when both sides are refusing to accommodate the other.

Democrats, who have minorities in both the Senate and House, have demanded that a set of expiring health insurance tax credits be extended before they sign on to any deal. Republicans, who need several Democratic votes in the Senate, said those negotiations should wait until after the funding measure passes.

▶ Read more about partisan messaging from federal agencies

The DOJ dismissed the top national security prosecutor amid criticism from a conservative commentator over his work during the Biden administration, further roiling the prominent U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia after the ousting of other senior attorneys in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.

Michael Ben’Ary, who was chief of the office’s national security section, was fired Wednesday just hours after writer and activist Julie Kelly shared online that he was previously senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco during the Biden administration, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

Kelly’s post speculated that Ben’Ary may have been part of the “internal resistance” in the office to the recently charged case against FBI Director James Comey. But Ben’Ary played no role in the Comey case, one of the people said.

— Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker

▶ Read more about the firings

On Thursday morning, as thousands of federal employees stayed home and faced potential layoffs because of the government shutdown, Trump got right to work on social media.

He started by sharing praise from supporters. Then he falsely claimed that “DEMOCRATS WANT TO GIVE YOUR HEALTHCARE MONEY TO ILLEGAL ALIENS.” And then he announced that he would meet with his top budget adviser to figure out where to make permanent cuts to federal programs that “are a political SCAM.”

All that was before 8 a.m., just one flurry in a blizzard of online commentary from the president. Like so many other times when he’s faced complex crises with no easy solutions, Trump seems determined to post his way through it.

The stream of invective and trolling has been remarkable even for a 79-year-old president who is as chronically online as any member of Gen Z. His style is mirrored by the rest of his administration, which so far seems more interested in mocking and pummeling Democrats than negotiating with them.

▶ Read more about the president’s online presence here

Native American communities that have long wanted the removal of military honors for the soldiers involved in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre had their hopes dashed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his effort to root out what he calls a “ woke culture ” in the armed forces.

Hegseth announced last week in a video on social media that the soldiers will keep their Medals of Honor, part of a wider Trump administration move that Indigenous leaders and historians call part of a culture war against racial and ethnic minorities and women’s rights.

In 1890 an estimated 250 men, women and children were killed by soldiers on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, many as they fled the violence and well after orders to cease fire. Some estimates put the number of dead at over 300, more than half women and children.

In a social media post Thursday, Hegseth referred to the events at Wounded Knee as a “battle.” But most historians disagree.

“Hegseth’s proclamation on this reflects the way that this administration thinks of history — as something that one person can somehow determine through a magical proclamation,” said Philip Deloria, a Harvard history professor and member of the Dakota Nation.

▶ Read more about the massacre and Hegseth

“Donald Trump enacted massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors, for the wealthy, the well off and the well-connected. All to subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. And this was done permanently?,” Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, said to reporters on the steps of the Capitol.

“And now, they want the American people — not us Democrats — the American people to accept anything less than a permanent extension of tax credits that make their healthcare affordable?”

Jeffries said that a permanent extension of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance subsidies was House Democrats’ negotiating stance. Some Senate Democrats have floated a temporary annual extension of the subsidies in shutdown talks.

Jeffries said House Democrats were open to “common sense” and “bipartisan” negotiations to fund the government but questioned whether the president, vice president and congressional Republicans “are behaving like individuals who actually want to reopen the government.”

Federal health officials have approved another generic version of the abortion pill, prompting outrage from abortion opponents.

Anti-abortion groups quickly criticized the move on Thursday, calling it a “stain” on the administration of President Donald Trump. The groups have been pushing for a safety review of mifepristone.

The FDA first approved the drug as safe and effective in 2000.

The new version of the pill is from tiny drugmaker Evita Solutions. It’s not the first generic version. The FDA first approved a generic in 2019.

▶ Read more about generic abortion pill

The State Department says the flotilla of humanitarian aid and activists intercepted by Israel as it was heading to Gaza is a “deliberate and unnecessary provocation” that could distract from the Trump administration’s latest effort to secure a peace deal between Israel and Hamas.

In brief comments sent to reporters on Thursday, the department said it was committed to assisting any U.S. citizens who may have been participating in the flotilla and been detained by Israel but offered no details other than to say it was “monitoring the situation.”

However, it also cast aspersions on the concept of the flotilla, vessels of which were stormed by Israeli authorities Wednesday in the Mediterranean.

“The flotilla is a deliberate and unnecessary provocation,” it said. “We are currently focused on realizing President Trump’s plan to end the war, which has been universally welcomed as a historic opportunity for a lasting peace.”

The president said in an interview taped Wednesday with One America News that “there could be firings and that’s their fault,” but said there could be other impacts from the shutdown.

“We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut,” Trump said in a clip from the interview, which was released ahead of the full interview set to air Thursday night.

Trump said he didn’t want the shutdown but people are suggesting he did because, he said, “I’m allowed to cut things that never should have been approved in the first place and I will probably do that.”

The State Department says it will increase staffing at certain U.S. embassies and consulates to accommodate an expected major jump in visa applications from soccer fans wanting to attend World Cup matches in the United States next year.

The department said Thursday that it will send hundreds of additional consular officers to “designated countries” to handle the demand for visa interviews. The number of additional staffers and the countries where they will be deployed have yet to be determined because the 48-team field for the 2026 World Cup hasn’t yet been finalized.

Tickets for the tournament hosted by U.S., Canada and Mexico next year went on sale Wednesday amid concerns over the Trump administration’s crackdown on both migration and temporary visas that offer permission to enter the United States.

“When you look at the number of individuals that have been laid off already, prior to the shutdown, the overwhelming majority of them are Black federal workers,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat.

Meeks, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus’s political arm, said the group is launching a campaign to counter Republican messages blaming Democrats for the shutdown. The campaign will include on the ground events in targeted districts, as well as engagement with local news, influencers and civic leaders across the country.

“Whether it’s churches or barbershops, we’re going to be looking to get the message out to and where the people are, in the streets,” said Meeks.

President Donald Trump has declared drug cartels operating in the Caribbean are unlawful combatants and says the United States is now in a “non-international armed conflict,” according to a Trump administration memo obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday.

A U.S. official familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly said the Congress was notified about the designation by Pentagon officials on Wednesday.

The move comes after the U.S. military last month carried out three deadly strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. At least two of those operations were carried out on vessels that originated from Venezuela.

▶ Read more about drug cartels

— Aameer Madhani and Lisa Mascaro

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says that the Senate will come back on Friday to vote once again on reopening the government.

“If that fails, then we’ll give them the weekend to think about it. We’ll come back and we’ll go again on Monday,” the South Dakota Republican said.