What Next - Actually the Government Shut Down Months Ago
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
Donald Trump’s theory of a government shutdown was that it would give him more power to fire federal employees, and cut benefits and healthcare. Of course, if you claim to be an all-powerful executive, aren’t people going to conclude that the shutdown is your fault?
Guest: David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In late August 1992, Randy Weaver and his family were refusing to come down from the remote Idaho mountaintop where they lived. |
| 0:09.0 | Weaver, a fugitive on a federal firearms charge, has been hold up in a cabin near Naples for more than a year. |
| 0:15.0 | The government thought Randy Weaver was a dangerous, possibly violent extremist. |
| 0:20.0 | Randy and his wife Vicky thought the government |
| 0:23.0 | was an agent of Satan on earth. When it was all over, three people were dead, and the government |
| 0:29.2 | had spent millions of dollars to catch one man. We'll find out why the siege at Ruby Ridge |
| 0:34.7 | unfolded the way it did, and think about some of the questions it raises. |
| 0:39.4 | What should we do about white supremacists? Why has the story of Ruby Ridge become an enduring |
| 0:45.3 | myth for the far right? And whose fault was it anyway? |
| 0:51.0 | Subscribe to Standoff, what happened at Ruby Ridge Ridge in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. |
| 1:04.9 | I called up the American prospects David Dayan yesterday because I had this question gnawing at me. |
| 1:12.2 | As I watched the government sputter to a close on Tuesday, the whole project felt off, |
| 1:18.0 | more like a whimper than a bang, which was weird because this show has been anticipating a |
| 1:23.8 | government shutdown for weeks. And I knew that when I asked David why I was feeling this way, |
| 1:30.5 | he'd have an answer for me. Well, because we've really been in kind of a slow motion shutdown for |
| 1:38.0 | quite a while now. What David means here is that the Trump administration has been sending government employees home for months, |
| 1:48.0 | clawing back federal funding, too. A shutdown is what happens when congressionally appropriated funds run out. |
| 1:56.0 | But the truth is, Congress has been sitting on the sidelines of appropriations all year. |
| 2:02.3 | So the Trump administration has withheld something like if we believe the calculations of the |
| 2:10.5 | Senate and House Appropriations Committee's Democratic staffs, $410 billion in funding. |
| 2:18.3 | That, just to give you the numbers, is close to half of all non-defense discretionary spending in the last fiscal year. |
| 2:27.3 | The president has been spending on what he likes and not spending on what he doesn't like. And that's kind of what happens |
... |
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