No Money for NYC With or Without Zohran!

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Oct 01, 2025

Russ Vought, Director of the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB), speaks at the National Conservative Convention in Washington D.C., Sept. 3, 2025. (Photo by Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

There are a few Trump II retribution threads converging today in the hours since the government shut down after the fiscal year ended at midnight Wednesday.

Since as early as last week, White House Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought has been hinting that if Democrats held the line and actually went through with withholding their votes to keep the government open, there would be some sort of hell to pay. Specifically, he directed federal agencies last week to begin putting reduction in force plans in place that include permanent layoffs and mass firings within the federal government.

It was these exact types of worries in March that swayed some Democrats to help Republicans pass a short term spending bill to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. At the time, the Department of Government Efficiency had just begun its rampage through the federal government and Democrats were concerned that President Trump might use a shutdown as an excuse to enact a slew of politically-motivated and haphazard firings.

Trump and his cronies in the White House have demonstrated in the months since that they don’t need the excuse of a shutdown to engage in such activities. Democrats chose to ignore Vought’s threats last week, and are still holding out on giving Republicans votes to reopen the government unless they can reach some sort of deal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and restore Medicaid coverage.

Vought is doubling down today with other threats that Trump had signaled were coming: pulling federal funding from blue cities and states. When Trump floated the idea of withholding federal funds from New York City on Monday (it’s been an item on his retribution agenda for some time), he announced it on Truth Social as part of a light election interference post about New York City’s upcoming mayoral election.

Even though he’s been threatening to do this to all blue cities (under the guise of punishing places with sanctuary protections for undocumented immigrants) for a while, that Truth post said that he would withhold federal funds if popular progressive candidate and Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani won the election in November.

“What’s the point of voting for him?” Trump mused on Truth Social.

As we discussed in Where Things Stand on Monday, none of this is actually about Mamdani. Vought made that point explicit on Wednesday morning when he announced that the Trump administration was going to freeze $18 billion in funding for infrastructure projects in New York City to “ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Concerns around “DEI” are the cover the Trump administration is using to unilaterally punish any aspect of American life and culture MAGA doesn’t like. In this case, Vought is clearly trying to hit elected Democrats where it hurts for blocking the CR: both top members of Democratic leadership in Congress are from New York. On Wednesday afternoon, Vought expanded his shutdown retribution crusade to include a bunch of blue states as well.

This will likely continue until Trump gets what he wants.

Speaking of Those Mass Firings

Don’t worry, Vought still intends to make good on those threats, too. He’s just putting it off a few days. Vought told House Republicans in a private call Wednesday that mass firings of federal workers, which he threatened to make permanent, will begin “in a day or two,” Politico reported. He also gave Republicans an outline of when cuts to some programs and military pay, which they can use to attack Dems, will begin. Per Politico:

Vought warned that money is about to run out for both the nutrition program for low-income moms and babies, known as WIC, and for pay for active-duty members of the military.
Troops are set to miss paychecks starting Oct. 15 if the government remains closed. Lawmakers in both chambers are preparing legislation to pay troops amid the shutdown, but GOP leaders will wait before making a call to put such a bill to a vote, given it lessens their leverage on Democrats, according to three other people with direct knowledge granted anonymity. Leaders are so far sticking to the argument that Democrats need to approve the clean, seven week stopgap if they want to pay troops.

Johnson Loves Trump’s War on Blue Cities

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is enthusiastic about Trump’s just-announced, dystopian plans to force the military to conduct “trainings” in cities run by Democratic politicians, as part of his ongoing war on blue cities and interest in deploying the military domestically against civilians. Per the Hill:

“It‘s a win-win scenario because National Guardsmen are proud of that duty that they performed, and they brought crime down dramatically in D.C. And all of us are safe. Our staffs are safe. They’re not walking in fear right now. I think we should do that in every major city run by Democrats who aren’t serious,” Johnson said.