Tony Romm
speaker
148 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 8 May
Tony Romm’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And they began to take the steps to do that last week when they announced an initial batch of about 4,000 federal workers across eight major agencies that they were going to cut from government in a process that will take about 60 days.
That has been the subject of litigation.
A federal judge recently blocked the administration from proceeding with those layoffs, but the president and his aides have made clear that they're not backing down and they really do want to cut government.
And so if those people are in fact laid off, that's just another financial blow on top of what they're already experiencing.
Yeah, I think Katie is absolutely right that this is emboldening Democrats to keep fighting, even though they have seen pretty staggering cuts in some cases to their states and districts as the president has weaponized this shutdown.
But I think the reason that's happening is because they have this deeper worry about the ways in which the president has asserted his power to rearrange the budget and to do so in a way that disregards what Congress may say about what he must spend or what he must not spend.
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
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