U.S. President Donald Trump announced he will meet with his budget director, Russell Vought, on Thursday to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to cut, aiming to exert pressure on his political opposition during the second day of a government shutdown. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump said in a social media post. Trump has already frozen federal transit and green-energy funding for Democratic-leaning states and has threatened to fire more federal workers during the shutdown, which began on Wednesday due to a partisan standoff in Congress, Reuters reported. He is on track to push out 3 lakh federal workers by the end of the year. In his post, Trump mentioned Vought’s involvement with Project 2025, a plan by the conservative Heritage Foundation that calls for radically downsizing the federal govt. Trump’s administration has already pursued many aspects of that plan, such as dismantling the Department of Education and curtailing the govt’s power to fight pollution. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Trump could fire thousands of workers, though she did not provide details. Several federal employee unions have filed a lawsuit to prevent that from happening, but federal courts have allowed layoffs to proceed while similar cases are being litigated. Earlier, former Vice President Kamala Harris, who had made Project 2025 a central part of her argument that Trump was too extreme to be president again, responded to his gleeful social media post.“This was always the plan,” Ms. Harris wrote. “Project 2025 was Donald Trump’s blueprint to seize unchecked power within the federal government and restrict Americans’ freedoms. And he is implementing it right in front of our eyes.”
