SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It is Friday. The federal government is still shut down, and outwardly, at least, there appears to be no real progress toward any sort of deal. In fact, President Trump is bragging on social media that the impasse gives him more power to slash the federal government over Democrats' objections. What does it all mean and what happens next? We will talk about that with NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hi to you both.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, good to be here.
DETROW: Franco, I want to start with you and this threat of layoffs. The White House has been threatening to permanently fire, not just furlough, a lot of federal workers. Usually, people are put on furlough or called to work without pay. Why are we suddenly hearing about layoffs?
ORDOÑEZ: I mean, I think the big picture is, this is something that Republicans and especially the MAGA wing of Republicans have been working on for years. I mean, a lot of it comes down to Russ Vought. He's the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And some of our listeners will remember him as one of the key architects of the controversial Project 2025. You know, he has long advocated for a much more muscular OMB and much more muscular White House that really acts more in an activist way of cutting spending and overhauling the federal government.
And now that he's in office, you know, he's really taking that to heart, and he's got his fingers on some of the most controversial aspects or moves that this administration has taken in the first few months, including dramatically downsizing the federal bureaucracy, ending diversity hiring, and withholding billions and billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated funds.
MONTANARO: It's really notable because during the campaign in 2024, then-candidate Trump was trying to distance himself...
DETROW: Oh, yeah.
MONTANARO: ...From Project 2025, which was this blueprint created for a second Trump term by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Vought was one of the chief authors. And all we've seen now is that a lot of the people who helped write Project 2025 and were part of it have just rolled right into the Trump administration.
DETROW: Let's talk about the blaming and the messaging because that's always a big part of the shutdown. And usually one side is blamed more than the other, and that kind of is a pretty clear indicator of how the shutdown is going to end, who's going to get what they want. Democrats saying they're refusing to back a funding bill without extending Affordable Care Act subsidies, and Republicans continue to escalate their rhetoric - Domenico, what sticks out to you about how the White House is talking about all of this?
MONTANARO: Look, the president has a bully pulpit. He's not afraid to use it. Democrats really can't seem to figure out what to hit him with. I mean, health care is a pretty smart place for Democrats to start from because the Affordable Care Act now has a 64% favorability rating when it comes to the KFF tracking poll. That's pretty high, not - certainly not where it was in 2010, when Democrats lost a bunch of seats.
And look, it's absolutely true that if you don't extend subsidies, then it's going to get way more expensive to buy health care for millions of people. Republicans feel like they're able to say, this is not what is in anything that Republicans have put in the bill and that Democrats are just trying to extract a negotiation around something that is unrelated.
DETROW: Franco, let's talk specifically about the White House language here. The White House has the biggest pulpit, for sure. Here's, this morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaking to Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition.
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KAROLINE LEAVITT: They picked a partisan fight over health care funding, which, by the way, is a fight and a discussion worth having, but we can't have it at the ninth hour when the federal government is shutting down.
DETROW: So Franco, that's on one hand. Then on the other hand, you have President Trump tweeting racist memes, AI-generated videos, mocking Democrats and really celebrating opportunities to punish Democrats and Democrat-controlled states. How does that leave space to have a serious conversation, like what the press secretary is talking about?
ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, I mean, I think there's real questions about how much the president is taking this seriously. I mean, look, this stuff is going viral on TikTok. It's going viral on Instagram. It is all over the place. And I'll just note, you're not seeing Democrats as much on those platforms. So good or bad, whether it's a show of seriousness - I think that's a debatable question. But what I think you can't debate is that he is controlling the narrative in at least this fashion.
MONTANARO: Unity is really important in a shutdown, and right now, Republicans - the Republican base certainly has more unity than Democrats. Our poll this week, the NPR/PBS News poll with Marist College, found that 77% of Republicans back Republicans in Congress. Only 48% of Democrats back Democrats in Congress. So there's the potential here that Democrats could fracture a bit, that they're not certain of what the strategy should be. The person who seems to be leading that strategy - one of them, anyway - is Chuck Schumer, who's the Democratic leader in the Senate, and here he was talking about that strategy and what they're going to do on MSNBC's Morning Joe this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MORNING JOE")
CHUCK SCHUMER: We're willing to sit down and negotiate a good deal to help the American people out of the health care dilemma. But in the meantime, we are going to be fighting everywhere - on TV stations like yours, in the social media, in picketing, in protesting, in emails, in every way.
MONTANARO: The fact is, Schumer is not exactly the best messenger oftentimes for Democrats. He's not someone, as Franco is talking about, going viral on social media for the right reasons and pushing back against Trump. So Democrats are really searching - and have been searching since Obama was out of the White House in 2016 - for who their messenger can be, and the message war is going to be what winds up ending this shutdown.
DETROW: So any sense what the path forward is at this point in time?
MONTANARO: Well, Democrats start out with a marginal advantage here. Our poll found that by a 38- to 27% margin - that people would blame Republicans more than Democrats, but 31% of people are undecided. So the messaging that takes place is going to be key because that 31% is who they're targeting both sides to try to win over. And we know that in 2019, when the longest shutdown in history took place, Trump was being blamed far more than he's being blamed right now, and that's what sort of pushed him to the table, but that took a month.
ORDOÑEZ: You know, I think really a big question is, how long does this go? Because if it keeps going longer and longer and Vought gets the opportunity to make a lot of these cuts, and those cuts start to have impact - whether it's firing of federal workers, cuts to health care - I think real people are going to start feeling the effects, and I think you might see a difference.
DETROW: Franco Ordoñez, Domenico Montanaro, thanks to both of you.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
ORDOÑEZ: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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