President Donald Trump is trying to turn a government shutdown into an ultimatum for higher education and the federal workforce, and he is already auditioning Democrats as the fall guys.
In a friendly One America News Network interview, Trump waved at a leaked Office of Management and Budget memo and suggested that if the shutdown drags on, he can fire thousands of federal employees and permanently cancel projects Democrats care about, then blame them for the carnage. “There could be firings, and that’s their fault,” he told OANN’s Daniel Baldwin. “We could cut projects that they wanted, favorite projects, and they’d be permanently cut.” Translation: comply with the agenda, or watch the pink slips and program cuts pile up.
The comments landed as the shutdown took effect at midnight, and as the administration sent universities a political ultimatum dressed up as policy. The pitch is simple and menacing at once, accept a 10-page “compact” of MAGA priorities, and you keep access to federal money and perks. Refuse, and enjoy the new austerity. The same hardball theme seemed to carry into Trump’s shutdown spin, where he insisted he now holds extraordinary power to clear out agencies and shred funding lines, even those already appropriated.
Democrats call it what it looks like, a power grab with a scapegoat prewritten. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted the OMB firing talk as “since day one” intimidation, arguing that Trump’s mass-layoff theatrics are designed to scare, not govern. He predicted the firings would be overturned in court or quietly reversed later, just like prior purges. That critique hit as reports circulated that the White House is begging hundreds of laid-off federal staffers from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to come back, an irony thick enough to cut with a box cutter.
Policy, meanwhile, is being run like a political hostage note. Trump is trying to pin the shutdown on Democrats for refusing to swallow a GOP spending plan unless it restores health-care tax subsidies and reverses Republican cuts to Medicaid. He frames that as Democrats choosing “illegal aliens” over Americans, a claim fact-checkers have repeatedly flagged as false, but one that reliably lights up the base. The bigger tell came in his Truth Social rallying cry, where the shutdown was cast as a GOP “opportunity” to “clear out dead wood, waste, and fraud.” In other words, treat a national crisis as a staffing cull and a budget bonfire.
And yet, the projects dearest to Trump are proceeding right on schedule. Tariff talks, oil and gas permits, even plans for a splashy new White House ballroom remain insulated from the austerity buzzsaw. That contrast, federal scientists and air-traffic controllers staring down unpaid weeks while a gilded pet project glides ahead, is the shutdown in miniature.
The administration’s education “compact” demands five years of frozen tuition, sharp limits on international students, a government-approved definition of gender, and special protections for conservative speech. Sign here for “multiple positive benefits,” the letter says. Administrators read it as a loyalty oath with a grant application stapled to the back. Some schools may try to negotiate wording around the edges. Others will likely take it to court and dare the White House to defend viewpoint policing and ideological litmus tests with taxpayer dollars at stake.
Trump insists he didn’t want this shutdown. “A lot of people are saying” he did, he allowed, because it lets him cut things that “should never have been approved.” That slip says the quiet part. The shutdown isn’t just leverage, it is the point, a pretext to punish enemies, reward friends, and dare anyone to stop him. The bill will come due for workers, students, and families long before it reaches the politicians boasting about “winning.”
