Trump’s Government Shutdown Cuts Supercharge His War on Equity

As the federal government shutdown stretches into its second week, President Donald Trump is targeting nearly $30 billion in cuts to federal funding almost exclusively to Democratic states and cities. The impact of the cuts to public transit, energy projects, and fundamental civil rights programs could carry far-reaching harms across the nation and the economy.

The cuts are the next step in the implementation of executive orders issued by Trump that strive to eradicate policies that advance racial and gender equity, tackle the climate crisis, and threaten the fossil fuel industry. 

Democrats are holding firm for concessions to lower health care costs while Republicans in the House have sent their members home until at least October 14. The shutdown has shuttered services and programs Americans rely on and furloughed 750,000 government workers deemed “nonessential,” including almost 90 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather than try to end the shutdown, Trump is reveling in it. Calling it an “unprecedented opportunity,” Trump is leveraging the shutdown to exact revenge on his perceived enemies and to blame Democrats for painful cuts to government jobs and programs he has long-opposed. 

In immediate jeopardy is funding for over $20 billion for public transportation expansions in Chicago, New York City, and the Hudson River Rail Tunnel between New York and New Jersey that would impact hundreds of thousands of rail travelers throughout the Eastern Seaboard; nearly $8 billion for energy projects in over a dozen states across the country; and core civil rights programs providing equity in federal contracting.

“In Donald Trump’s authoritarian America, even the trains won’t run on time,” wrote New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer.

Democrat Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner in New York’s upcoming mayoral race, slammed “Trump and his sycophants” for treating people as mere “political pawns” and taking actions that will have immensely serious consequences on their lives and livelihoods. “This is about Donald Trump going to war with New York City,” Mamdani said.

Rescinding these funds would likely result in higher transportation and energy costs as well as the loss of thousands of jobs, critics warn. Increased access to public transit can save people more than $13,000 per year versus driving. Across the country, household electricity bills are skyrocketing, but the administration intends to cancel hundreds of projects and programs designed to increase energy supply and equity and reduce costs.

Brent Booker is General President of the Laborers’ International Union of North America which represents construction workers impacted by the project cuts. In a statement, Booker blamed the White House and Republican members of Congress for failing to negotiate in good faith and putting essential services that Americans rely on daily at risk. He called the energy and infrastructure cuts, “scorched earth style retaliation” adding, “these project cancellations are an immediate and dire threat to our economy and the livelihoods of thousands of construction workers.”

“The health implications are really significant,” Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) tells me. Clean transit and energy protect public health and the climate, reducing pollution and the carbon footprint, she says. Despite making history as the first Latina woman elected to represent Arizona on September 23, she is still waiting for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana to swear her in as a member of Congress. “These projects were already authorized” by Congress, she explains, and have now been arbitrarily cut because Trump “doesn’t like what city they’re in.” 

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who is overseeing the cuts, is a co-author of Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation. On X, Vought described the nearly $8 billion in energy projects cuts as cancelling “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” echoing the same explanation given by the Department of Energy. The Department of Transportation explained the infrastructure cuts by stating that Illinois and New York are “well known to promote race- and sex-based contracting and other racial preferences as a public policy.”

“The Trump administration is trying more aggressively than any prior administration to dismantle civil rights policies developed to further the mission of equality in the United States,” Georgetown University Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy professor Michele Bratcher Goodwin tells me. Goodwin is co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. On a variety of topics “courts across the country, including conservative judges, even Trump-appointed judges, have said overwhelmingly that what he has been doing has been unlawful and unconstitutional,” Goodwin adds. “There’s a lot of winning that is going on.”

But Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress have proven unwilling to act as a bulwark against the president’s increasingly autocratic actions, illegality, and usurpation of congressional authority, particularly its power of the purse. Vought authored the section of Project 2025 focused on the expansion of presidential powers and executive authority. While he implemented his agenda largely from the shadows during the first months of Trump’s presidency, he is now taking center-stage and a leading role in the government shutdown.

Trump touted on social media how Vought, “of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” wants to use the shutdown to eliminate “Democratic Agencies.” He later posted an AI-generated video featuring a cover of Blue Öyster Cult with Vought as “The Reaper” (death incarnate) in full black robes, scythe in hand, and with congressional Democrats and federal employees seated at their desks in his sights.

“Naked and Brazen Corruption”

On the first day of the government shutdown, Vought took to social media to announce nearly $8 billion in cuts to energy projects in Democratic states, listing California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. 

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called the move, “Just naked and brazen corruption. All states represented by Democrats in the Senate. Time to stiffen our spines and demand that we only fund a government that obeys the law.” Others have pointed out that these are all states that voted for Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, for president in 2024.

The list of affected projects includes major upgrades to electrical grids in California, Minnesota and Oregon; efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado; and large hubs to produce hydrogen fuels in California and the Pacific Northwest, according to a New York Times analysis. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that New Mexico lost $135.2 million for 10 energy projects that include renewable energy and battery storage microgrids to improve energy access and service across the state. Hawaii public radio found that the state lost some $68 million for electrical grid reliability, zero-emission vehicles, and a renewable energy microgrid at the U.S. Joint Airforce and Naval Base Pearl Harbor Hickam.

“This is a shameless and vindictive attack by Director Vought, which will eliminate jobs and raise energy costs for Americans across the country,” said House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in a statement.

On the same day and within hours of the shutdown, Vought took to X to announce more than $18 billion in cuts to public transit infrastructure projects in the Democratic strongholds of New York and New Jersey, followed two days later by another post announcing over $2 billion in cuts to public transit projects in Chicago. 

The $18 billion supports the expansion of the Second Avenue Subway line in New York City and a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, which carries hundreds of Amtrak and commuter trains with hundreds of thousands of passengers daily, affecting travel between Boston and Washington. 

The $2.1 billion supports Chicago’s modernization and upgrades of its public transit system, including the addition of four new train stops on the city’s South Side, improving access for the areas low-income and communities of color. 

“Right when we are finally on the brink of moving forward, Trump just cut off the funding. From public safety to public education to public transit, this president is cutting the services that working people rely upon,” Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Brandon Johnson, said in an October 3 statement.

The funding cuts to Chicago take place amid Trump’s escalating broadscale attack on the city’s residents and Democratic leadership. Trump has deployed ICE and the Texas National Guard, and declared on social media that Johnson and the state’s governor should be jailed “for failing to protect ICE Officers.” Johnson warned Wednesday on CNN that Trump is “unstable, unhinged” and “a threat to our democracy,” and that “it’s certainly not the first time that Donald Trump has called for the arresting of a Black man unjustly.”

The Real World

Implementing Trump and Vought’s attack on public infrastructure in Democratic cities and states and federal civil rights law is Sean Duffy, secretary of the Department of Transportation. Duffy is a far-right former congressman and Fox News host with limited transportation experience. His White House bio touts his reality TV show props (MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules All Stars), including being one half of “America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” citing his 25-year marriage and nine children with Rachel Campos-Duffy. 

At a Senate hearing in May, Duffy told Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York that he would not cancel federal grants that had been awarded for the two New York projects. “If you’re asking me if I plan on canceling those grant agreements, I do not,” he said.

Duffy is a climate skeptic who voted against climate and environmental action at every opportunity during his time in Congress. He has a visceral disdain for public transit, which he describes as “dirty” “homeless shelters” and “insane asylums” filled with “criminals” who “prey upon the good people.” 

In a Fox News interview in May, Duffy and host Larry Kudlow decried bike, pedestrian, and public transit lanes, despite extensive evidence that, compared to cars, physical (walking, biking) and social (public transit) commutes lead to healthier and happier people, save money, and reduce harmful air pollution. Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the country. Public transit policy can be used to advance social justice and equity, with Black and Hispanic workers nearly three times as likely to use public transit than white workers. 

Transportation infrastructure has long been used “as a powerful tool to enforce white supremacy,” American Civil Liberties Union President Deborah Archer explained on a podcast with W. Kamau Bell earlier this year. Archer is associate dean at the New York University School of Law and author of Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. “White supremacy depends on Black people knowing ‘their place’ in a social hierarchy and staying there,” she said. 

“In cities, failing public transit continues to isolate Black neighborhoods from jobs and essential services,” Archer wrote recently in Rolling Stone. “And as climate change intensifies storms, floods, and heat waves, Black communities are, once again, consistently left exposed, unprotected, and forgotten.”

“When the Biden-Harris administration came in, they did not just create plans in a vacuum, they went and listened to people in the community” to learn what projects were needed, “and financing flowed from those discussions,” Michele Roberts, national co-coordinator of the Environmental Justice Health Alliance, tells me. The programs included projects to address historic and ongoing environmental racism and injustices, and the disproportionate health and economic burdens in Black and Brown communities that followed.

Within days of taking office, Duffy released a series of memos that call for the purge of all Department of Transportation actions — including rules, regulations, policies, and funding agreements — that relate “in any way to climate change, ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions, racial equity, gender identity, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ goals, environmental justice or the Justice 40 initiative.” He subsequently froze project funding while the agency reviewed grants for these offenses.

Last week, Duffy issued an interim final rule “barring race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grants.” The order targets the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, which for four decades has enjoyed bipartisan congressional support to address systemic inequalities in government infrastructure contracting that has discriminated against small businesses owned by women and people of color. Within days of issuing the rule, the agency announced the transit cuts to New York and Chicago. Communities across the country are now bracing for more cuts.

Goodwin, the Georgetown professor, says the rule is illegal: “Now this gets to be vetted before court, but for decades the federal government has engaged in contracting that is sex- and race-based, recognizing that providing opportunities to those that were previously excluded” is a necessary condition of attempting to “level that playing field that has been 400 years of cheating.” She adds, “As a consolation, now you have some bidding power.” 

A coalition representing minority and women owned businesses has sued the Trump administration, pointing to extensive documentation from the Department of Labor, among others, of historic and ongoing barriers to entry experienced by women and minority business owners seeking federal contracts. Ken Canty, the Black CEO of Atlantic Meridian Contracting Corporation explains in a statement, “This program was never about handouts — it’s about fair access. We’ve earned our place, and the court already recognized that we should be allowed to defend it.”

The lack of access extends beyond small businesses to include workers in the construction fields. Women workers, particularly women of color, face “significant obstacles to economic security in large part due to racism, sexism, and discrimination,” which create barriers to good jobs “that pay well, offer quality benefits and support workers’ right to come together in unions,” according to an analysis from the National Partnership for Women and Families. As a result, women workers have been underrepresented in industries funded by federal infrastructure investments.

Seeking White Men With Skills

Vought shared a social media post in August from the Department of Labor with an image of a young, white, male worker in a hardhat and the heading, “Make America Skilled Again.”