Tony Romm

Many of the areas that the president has looked to cut and the layoffs that he has looked to make, particularly during the shutdown, track with the things that he proposed to do as part of his 2026 budget.

He wanted to cut agencies like housing and health and energy and education, which are the very programs that he has targeted during the shutdown with the layoffs that the court has now blocked and with the other sorts of, quote, permanent cuts that he has said he is pursuing and could potentially put out later this week.

I think that this administration is always trying to test that and that this shutdown has just been the latest stage where they're trying to act that out.

And I think the president himself has said this.

I mean, on numerous occasions, he has described the shutdown as a, quote, unprecedented opportunity to make changes to the budget.

Because I think on some level, the White House does see this as a little bit of a win-win.

Like, I don't think that they want the government to be shut down, but I think that they're going to extract the greatest number of benefits that they can out of it while the government is shut down.

And they're going to do that with the help of folks like Russ Vogt, who runs the Office of Management and Budget, and has long preached this idea that the president should have expansive power to set the nation's spending levels and to defy Congress.

So this has just been, at least in the eyes of the president, a great opportunity to push further down this road of taking power over the nation's budget from lawmakers.

What do you say, Tony?

I would just echo exactly what Tyler said specifically on the impacts of the shutdown.

You know, before we all sat down here, I was talking to some state officials who administer the program called Food Stamps.

It's federal nutrition assistance for low-income Americans.

And they told me that because of the shutdown, because of how long it had gone, in some cases they've had to stop accepting applications for new benefits because

And they're worried about being able to pay benefits in the month of November.

That's not something that's shown up in the data, right?

It has not hit Americans' pocketbooks just yet.

But it will.

It'll happen soon.

And I think as you start to see cases like that throughout the economy, on top of the broader hits to the U.S.