That Day When Trump Shut Down the Government, With Shanti Stanton
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. Tuesday was an absolute clusterfuck when Donald Trump decided in a massive power grab to issue an executive order that would freeze all federal grants and loans that don't reflect his worldview. Every

Everyone in Washington was freaking out, trying to figure out what exactly does that mean? It was so broad and sweeping. Because of that and how haphazardly it was released, within 24 hours, they had to rescind the memo. But his spokesperson, Carolyn Leavitt, said the rest of the executive order freestands. So people are still trying to figure out exactly what that means. It's kind of unclear if the Trump administration even knows what that means.

I'm telling you, the past few days were even more chaotic than the early days of 2017. Now, people who are paid on K Street to literally explain to their clients, private corporations and nonprofits who apply for these loans and grants, what this meant for them. Will they get money? They couldn't figure out what to tell them. These lobbyists also help them apply for these grants and loans every single year.

It was chaotic. I mean, people I spoke to were trying to figure out if it impacts schools, school lunches, housing, like public housing, veterans, tunnels, infrastructure projects, basically anything that the government touches, like meals on wheels for seniors, Medicaid.

Now, the Trump administration did make it clear that it wouldn't impact Medicaid, but it was a very shock and awe approach by Donald Trump, a very clear message that government is too bloated and that he can slash spending at his own discretion. But it caused a lot of fear. A D.C. judge halted the executive order until February 3rd.

So to talk about all of this, how federal funding actually works, if what Donald Trump did was constitutional, I have DC insider and lobbyist Shanti Stanton, founder of Oxford Strategies on the show. She spent nearly a decade on Capitol Hill working for Nancy Pelosi and Dick Gephardt. And so she knows a few things about appropriations and who actually has the power of the purse. The president?

or Congress. She seems to know a little bit more than the Trump administration and ostensibly Elon Musk, who it's pretty clear was behind all of this. But first I want to talk about the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hearings. It was one of the few times I was actually glued to C-SPAN. I wanted to see how it would go. He is up for the Health and Human Services cabinet posting. It was amazing to watch him twist

and contort himself and backpedal on so many positions from being anti-vax in the past to being pro-choice. Now he is no longer anti-vax. He's now pro-vaccine safety. And he says he wants to work on ending chronic disease and making food more healthy, which should be the gold standard, right? That's ostensibly why he has such a strong legion of followers, especially mothers, who are rightfully questioning the preservatives and products in food.

Now, his former law school roommate, Sheldon Whitehouse, accused him of frightening people with his anti-vaccine campaigns. And at one point, Bernie Sanders displayed baby onesies from a company he used to chair that had the words printed, unvaxxed, unafraid. So it was actually a circus on the helm. He was confronted with the fact that the Samoa Islands had a very big outbreak of the measles after his anti-vax campaign. They literally ran out of caskets and...

A lot of people point to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for that. At the same time, he had to make conservatives happy. He had to say he wasn't an enemy to food producers, same food producers that he's questioned for what they put in our products. And he also had to say that he would look at the abortion pill Mifepristone after spending a very large part of his life being pro-choice. He was all over the place.

But the real question is, will he be confirmed? Will Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor who is clearly in the YOLO phase, only having two more years left in his term and not running for reelection, will he vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy? Just last week, he voted no against Pete Hexeth.

And the other moderates, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, also voted against Hegseth. And really, RFK can only lose four votes. So who is going to be the other person that could sink his nomination? Could it be Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor who voted to impeach Trump and seize the benefits of vaccines? We'll have to see. But for now, onward to the show with Shanti Stanton, our D.C. insider who knows all about appropriations and how government spending works.

It was so obvious that there was a sort of war going on yesterday between Donald Trump and his White House, specifically the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congress. A war over who actually controls spending. Now, it's worth unpacking what happened over 24 hours and what it was like in Washington, specifically on K Street, the people that are basically paid to be the translators of it all. Shanti...

Tell me, what was your initial reaction when you saw this? Well, first of all, Tara, it's so nice to be here with you. This is actually my first podcast, so thank you so much for having me on. Oh, welcome to the podcasting community. Thank you. I feel like I've stepped it up all of a sudden.

Yeah, I mean, I guess my first thought was, this is not legal. How can he do this? And I started thinking about, you said his shock and awe approach, and that's kind of how I think about it too, starting with his cabinet picks and his executive orders, all of them on day one, and the pardoning of the January 6th criminals and mass deportations. All of that sort of made sense to me. I'm a very well-established Democratic lobbyist, but I can be objective and I understand everything

the complaints that Republicans have about the government being too big and the need to want to, you know, get a little more specifics about, you know, who's working there and what they're doing. And is there, is there, you know, redundant work and other redundant funding programs? I get all of that, but there is a process that's been in place for over 200 years. And just because he was elected president,

president doesn't mean that he gets to rewrite the Constitution and erase everything that's happened before he became president. There are many options available to him moving forward. The CR... The continuing resolution, basically. A mini-budget bill. Yes. It's what's keeping the government afloat right now. Expires on March 14th. He has...

Every opportunity available to him to decide before that with his Republican Senate and House what programs get funded and what programs don't. He has a budget that he can put out the first week of February that can lay out very explicitly what gets funded and what doesn't.

What he cannot do is backtrack and erase what Congress's authority is, which is to appropriate money to these agencies to be funded. The problem yesterday was these agencies can't decide what they fund and what they don't fund. They can't say to the president, oh, what you're doing is illegal. You can't tell us we can't spend this money. And so they have to play along.

until they get told something else, either by the courts or by the courts. I mean, there's like no other way to resolve this except what he did, I guess, is he finally realized that, you know, this is not a viable option. But I don't know what's going on over there. It's clearly amateur hour. Like, I feel like Elon Musk is trying to run the government like Tesla or X and he needs a, you know, a tutorial in Appropriations 101. So basically the agencies have the money because they're

Congress has already given them the money. Congress already appropriated the money probably in advance from a spending bill like from last year, right? Right. And so basically Trump was saying you cannot give people the money for the programs that you are supposed to give it to. Right. And the problem is when...

companies get the funding or they get a loan. A lot of companies get loans. I have a client in the energy space and they have a loan and part of that loan will be used to build a manufacturing plant in the U S and they hire people and they break ground because they're depending on what's been guaranteed to them. And so backtracking and, and erasing this investment they made. And sometimes it's a corporation. Sometimes it's a school that has hired new teachers because they have new students and they, they, you know, everyone plans a budget.

generally speaking, in advance. And these people plan a year in advance. And so then to come at them at the end and say, oh, never mind, you're not getting your money, even though you've

got all these plans in place on how to spend it doesn't make any sense to me. So basically, even if they hired those teachers, assuming they were going to get that money... They wouldn't get paid. The teachers won't get paid. Yeah. And you might have to fire them or you can't rehire them for the following year. Yeah. And I really don't understand what he was trying to accomplish by this because I think there's this notion sometimes...

and I love Republicans, many of them, I have many friends, but there's this sort of widespread notion that poor people are Democrats. And that might be true in Palm Beach, but that is not true in rural America. And there's, you know, these Republican members vote for these programs as well, because depending on their district, they have a lot of people that benefit from them. I'm from very rural Colfax, Washington, try to find that on a map. And I

According to my Facebook page, they are all Republicans out there. And I promise you that many, many, many of them are getting... Our recipients for some of these programs, whether it's their children in school or school lunches or their parents that get the Meals on Wheels. And so it's... They love Trump, but they don't really...

Well, they don't realize that Biden's giving them the money for that stuff. Well, they don't realize the government's giving them the money for that. And it's not just Biden. You know, the funding actually, and there's a Republican house last year. And so the funding is very bipartisan and both sides get sort of, you know, programs that they need. That's how the whole process works. And I don't know. I mean, yesterday all day, I was thinking, where are the Republican appropriators? Like, I don't know, Tara, if you've ever... Well, they were in Florida, in Doral. Right. I'm like, you're there. But I...

I don't know if you've ever worked with appropriators, Tara, but they are very territorial over their space. They work very well together on a bipartisan basis and they come up with deals and they fund the entire government. It's their job and they take it very seriously. And I'll give you a little anecdote. I was working last year on gun violence research, which you might expect is more of a Democratic priority than a Republican one, but it does have bipartisan support.

But given the dynamics in Congress and the House being run by Republicans, it wasn't a huge priority for them. And so it didn't pass in the House bill. And I was sort of thinking like, oh, well, maybe I'll just call the champion on the Appropriations Committee and see if she's willing to, you know, maybe call over to HHS or the CDC or Biden's president, call Biden. You know, he would like this program and just see if maybe they can like take the money from like a different budget and move it over. And even

Even though this was one of her biggest priorities, she was like, no, as an appropriator, we don't promote spending any money separate from how we have specifically laid it out. She said, I'm going to try to work with the Senate and see if they'll put it in their bill. But she was totally unwilling to even think about that.

pushing money from somewhere that wasn't specifically a line item. Interesting. So do you think that Trump is trying to disrupt the balance of power with this move between the White House and Congress? Is he trying to show Congress, we control the budget, we control the money, our Office of Management budget is more powerful than Congress, even though for so long, Congress has been in control of the purse strings? Can I use the word dictatorship? I mean, I kind of felt like we were in Russia yesterday a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think

I think he is, but the problem is there are still laws in place and there's only so much you can do. But, you know, with controlling, you know, he really only controls one arm of the three branches of government and he's got a lot of support in the other two, but he still has to follow the rules. And a lot of this stuff still has to start now.

in the House and the Senate. It cannot start top down. You know, Trump has repeatedly contended that as a president, he has the authority to withhold congressionally approved spending that he considers to be wasteful. It's a practice known as impoundment that Congress prohibited in a 1974 law. I'm citing this from Politico, by the way, amid a fight with President Richard Nixon. The actions taken this weekend could open the door to an eventual court ruling granting that power.

So could you see the Supreme Court giving Trump this power that he can cut wasteful spending and override Congress based on this? I mean, I can't. I can't really speak to that because I'm not an attorney and who knows what the Supreme Court will do. But I just know based on the Constitution, this is not something that he's allowed to do. Well, unless the Supreme Court decides to. I suppose they could have a different interpretation. Although they seem to walk it back pretty quickly. I mean, 24 hours later.

Actually, within hours, they walked it back. I think this was more about ignorance, frankly. I do. I think it was just about ignorance. Because there's just, there's so many opportunities coming up where he can actually cut spending if he wants. I mean, why didn't he just send a letter to agencies saying, please give me an accounting of where your money's going and what employees you have and, you know, who's working one day a week or five days a week. And then, you know, as he prepares his budget, he can put in the cuts wherever he wants. Yeah.

What's the reputation of the Doge guys? I've heard they're like a bunch of private equity bros that are kind of young. They're running around Congress. We're trying to figure out what Democrats are going to be a part of that group and, you know, see if it's at all going to be bipartisan. Um,

You know, I think a lot of people are taking them seriously, clearly, because they have to. And, you know, trying to decide if they should meet with them or give briefings or who the point people are going to be. I mean, nobody's being totally dismissive of them. I think this was just a total misstep yesterday. I mean, it was really bad for them. But I think moving forward, there are a lot of members on both sides who realize that government...

cuts, spending cuts are going to take place. And so if they want to be a part of where those happen, they should come to the table and make their case. So a lot of people reached out to me yesterday being like,

been with Medicaid. Like if my father falls, am I going to have to pay for it all? My grandmother, I think is in a nursing home because with Medicaid, like that was a huge concern yesterday. Yeah. And it's oddly enough, I have a client in Illinois that gets Medicaid funding. And so I'm here in DC and, and this decision affects my DC clients. But then also, you know, I saw Pritzker on yesterday in the middle of the day talking about the Medicaid funding trickling down to Illinois. So it really does. You know, I think people were really in a panic

because it's really a lack of understanding of how the federal government works. A lot of people know how the state governments work and the amount of money that goes to fund a lot of these states and these state programs. Yeah, so Medicaid is a state program though. Well, there's both. Okay, yeah, there's just so much confusion and I frankly couldn't answer a lot of those questions. So I can only imagine what you were- Well, and then I saw, who's the Trump press secretary? Caroline Leavitt. She was on this morning.

And said something about like how this will not affect Medicaid, which is very clear. I'm like, y'all need to get your message straight because, you know, the documents did not support that. Because Trump has long supported Medicare and Medicaid. That was something that made him sort of different than the other Republicans, made him more populous. Like he said he supported social programs. Yes, but you can support them and fund them fully or you can support them and not fund them. And it sounded like he was supporting them and not wanting to fund them, which... Yeah.

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Before Biden left office, there were a lot of reports that Biden's team was trying to sort of Trump-proof their initiatives on energy, climate, and infrastructure spending. The big parts of his Infrastructure Reduction Act, his Build Back Better bills, like the main hallmarks of

of his presidency and his legacy. How have you seen that happen? And do you think that's even possible? Or do you think Donald Trump can just sort of tear through those initiatives? He does have some discretion. It's very difficult to take power away moving forward. It's also very difficult to take power away moving backward. So Biden tried to do the first. Trump tried to do the latter yesterday. And I think it's most effective to go through the process

process we've had in place for over 200 years, which is the appropriation and budget process. And Trump's going to have that opportunity in a week to start

really making cuts wherever he wants them to be. So whatever Biden did, I mean, you can't, you know, like fund programs for the next 10 years. Trump will be allowed to cut those if he wants. It's really just on an annual basis. Okay. So what did your friends, your Republican lobbyist friends think of this yesterday? I mean, I, you know, I'm on some group text chains and

And oddly, yesterday, I didn't hear a lot from the Republicans who I share clients with yesterday.

probably because, you know, it's easy for me to criticize the administration. I don't think there was anything for them to say. I mean, it was so shocking, I think, to all of us. And, you know, we're both trying to help or both sides are trying to help our clients try to navigate. I have clients in the nonprofit space and they have grantees who like weren't able to access the accounts they needed to pay their employees and continue with the programs that they've been approved to run and

And so they were looking for help. But yeah, I mean, I got the OMB memos from a Democrat on the Hill. So I don't know what Republicans were thinking. They were oddly quiet yesterday, the lobbyists, but also the...

The members. I mean, where were the members? So I'm reading in the Washington Post, states reported issues accessing funds under Medicaid. And even as of Wednesday, today, as we are taping, public housing authorities reported being locked out of their funding portal. Yeah, I mean, you can't just turn this stuff off and on in like a minute or two minutes. And people don't understand it. And so they panic. And I get it. Yeah. Yeah.

Caroline Leavitt, though, the White House spokeswoman, said that assistance for individuals would not be affected. Yeah, I mean, she said that this morning, but I honestly don't even think they know what they're talking about. I really don't. Now, does this affect the credibility of the next executive order they put out?

Well, it's not really an executive order in general that affects. I mean, this was like they basically shut the government down on their own, like unilaterally shut the government down. Generally speaking, we try to keep the government open and running. You can change it. You can, you know, give certain agencies less money. You can certainly fire people. You can reduce jobs. You can do all that stuff. But they shut down the government. It was like crazy. Right. Yeah. I never thought about that way. That's a really smart way of putting it. Trump essentially shut the government down. Unilaterally shut down the government. Yeah. Yeah.

It was wild. The last time I remember chaos like that was the Muslim ban. Yeah. Well, January 6th was pretty bad. Oh, and Charlottesville was pretty bad too. Yeah, it was pretty bad too. Okay, we could keep going, but do you know what I'm saying? Like it was just so out of the blue and shocking. Yeah, and Trump is very good about, you know, diverting attention and, you know, not taking blame for things. And I'm sure he'll do that here, but-

This was really a huge error on their part. And I don't know what they were trying to gain from it. They certainly didn't get that. And I think they have major egg on their face. He'll probably blame Elon Musk, which is fine. But will he blame Elon Musk? Who else is he going to blame? Yeah. He's not going to blame himself. What about Russ Vogt, the OMB guy? Maybe. But again, he's not even confirmed yet. I mean, these people...

Dick Kephart used to have a thing on his desk, the buck stops here. It's like at some point... There's no buck. The musk stops here. Yeah, I guess you could say that. Oh my gosh. Well, I don't know though. Musk is a very rich friend and he can, I guess, play around with the US government as much as he wants. Yeah.

Yeah. Again, appropriations 101. Maybe he needs a lesson. I can teach it to him. Are you offering Musk? Yes. I offer him appropriations 101, Elon, you and me. It's so funny because everyone says that about Elon Musk. They're just like, the guy has no idea how Washington works. He has so much money and yet has such little actual intel into Washington. And you would think that he would hire people. He's not even like spending time educating, right. Educating himself or hiring somebody to explain it to him. I mean, like, again, I'm not

criticizing them for wanting to reduce government. I get they feel that way, but like you have to understand how the process works before you can figure out how to reduce it. Right. But his entire mantra throughout life, and this is pretty documented in his biography, is that he believes that to create something, you have to break it and then rebuild it in a way that it can't be broken. And he thinks he can do that with government.

Again, you cannot create something that's never going to change because there are elections and different people are in charge. You can certainly make changes in the government. You can do that. But this is not Tesla and this is not X. This is a giant, think of it as like a giant corporation that affects the entire country. You can't come in in a week and shut the whole thing down and try to start over from scratch. Okay, I wanted to ask you this.

Do you think Musk benefited from what happened yesterday? I do not. Not his reputation. I mean, his companies like Tesla, SpaceX. I mean, I haven't looked at his stock. I don't know why they would have, frankly. I honestly believe they thought what they were doing was amazing and great and such a wonderful idea. I believe that. And I think it backfired on that. They thought that they were delivering on their base. I think that, yes. I think they thought like, oh, this is going to be great. Another shock and awe moment. We'll shut down all these programs that we don't like.

But it's, again, you know, amateur hour. But if you shut down electric vehicle initiatives, then how many try to do that? Competitors. Yeah, he really didn't, like, you know, shut them down for long enough for that to have had a benefit. And again, if you want to cut these programs, like if he wants to do that and he wants to benefit himself long-term, he can talk to the president, the president can put in his budget, I'm sure all the Republicans are going to vote for whatever they want, and he can do that long-term. You cannot do that in a day. Okay, what are you...

your clients going forward who are terrified that their grants or that their funding and their loans may not materialize or they may be rescinded later on? What are you advising them? Well, I don't, I think, you know what,

what happened yesterday has been, I think, resolved. But as we do every year, we involve ourselves in the appropriations process and we talk to members and we talk to champions and we find, you know, there's always bipartisan support for all the programs I work on. And you find champions that are going to help you, you know, shepherd it through the process. And we continue to do that every year. And it's, you know, frankly, the people I work with

expect to do that every year. They expect that a program is going to last a year and you have to continue to go back. And people are very, very aware that there's been a change in power and the same programs that were supported by the Biden administration will not be supported by the Trump administration. So we just continue forward with maybe some different talking points and some different champions. But for the most part, this is what we do as lobbyists. Right. I mean, every...

election, everyone assumes that the winning party, the lobbyists on that side will make the most money. They can charge the most. They have the most power, right? But do you think in this administration, there's more value for democratic lobbyists? Yes, for the most part, that's true. But I think...

Part of the reason is because the administration is so vast and covers so many agencies that if your party wins the administration, there's just a lot more work available if you are of that party. I think with the House and Senate...

It's been my experience that, especially with the House so close, and I do mostly House Democratic lobbying. Just three votes. Yeah. And so it's like, you know, Democrats are still very relevant. Democrats in the Senate, both parties are always going to be relevant in the Senate. And so it doesn't really change, you know, much.

on that front but yes certainly if you look at the registrations like former trump um allies are getting you know dozens of contracts who's the biggest fish right now i think ballard brian ballard i think he's gotten like 50 clients since january 1 or wasn't jeff miller like the big fish at one time jeff miller was a big fish is he still a big deal

Cause he was Kevin McCarthy's bestie. Well, yeah. Kevin McCarthy's persona non grata, but I thought he was fine, but I haven't heard Jeff Miller's name in a while, but you know, generally people get clients and they, they keep them. So he's doing fine. Yeah. And he's got some nice people over there. It's good to know. Anything else, Shanti, that you think we should know about this new Trump error and what it's like for K street? K street is just scrambling. Are you guys just more billable hours? I guess. Well, I mean,

Well, I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and just criticize them. Right. I mean, I don't have to work with them so I can kind of say whatever I want. And I'm sure my Democratic House and Senate members are perfectly happy with me doing this. So it doesn't it doesn't really bother me much. But but yeah, I mean, I think it's.

It's always harder. You can make more money and you can get more clients. It's always harder to have the administration of the same party because the expectations are very high. You have to call on your relationships very heavily and you have to, you know, clients rely on you to...

help them make inroads with the administration, which can be hard to do. I almost feel like I have the easy job right now, right? I just say no all the time to go ask the Trump people. But I really actually...

I most of the work I do is bipartisan and I enjoy that the most. So I do try to find ways to still and I still will to try to work with with the administration and with, you know, House and Senate Republicans through through the Democrats that I work with, many of which are bipartisan themselves. So we try. We'll continue.

That was another episode of Somebody's Got to Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off a subscription at Puck. That's uppercase T-A-R-A-20. See you again this week.