Republican Senator Thom Tillis slammed the Trump administration’s blatant targeting of blue states as lawmakers dig in, forcing the shutdown into at least next week.
President Donald Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought has announced nearly $28 billion in funds being canceled to date as the administration looks to punish blue cities and states. But Tillis warned the move will not help them solve the shutdown.
“I think that digs us a deeper hole. I think if you do that, you’re going to create a bad faith environment here that could put us further out,” the North Carolina senator warned.
“They need to be very judicious, and they should be consulting with Senate leadership and House leadership before they do it,” he added. “If they do it on their own, then they can own some of the reason why we get to an impasse.”
Tillis argued that Vought’s actions could cause Democrats to dig in further in the standoff over the spending deal.
“If OMB goes about canceling things, just like the rescissions that were foundational to past compromises, you destroy the credibility of future compromises,” Tillis warned.
“Quite honestly, if I’m a Democrat, and I negotiated something… and I’ve been tracking that program and it gets tanked, I’m not going to have any faith that you can deliver on your promises in this administration. That’s just the reality,” he vented.
The administration yanking money could cause serious challenges for the Senate’s ability to pass budget bills in the future as they would still need bipartisan support to reach the 60 vote threshold.
On Friday afternoon, the Senate held a fourth vote on the short-term Republican spending bill, but Democrats again rejected it.
Tillis wasn’t the only Republican senator unsettled by the Trump administration’s seeming desire to punish blue states with funding cuts.
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said they should not be targeting in a way that could be viewed as punitive.
While the Trump administration’s pulling of funds has made some Republicans uneasy, GOP congressional leadership refuses to criticize the White House’s approach.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have repeatedly thrown their hands up, arguing if Congress turns off the lights, it gives the executive branch the authority to take action.
“Russ takes no pleasure in this,” Johnson claimed on Friday.
Trump has called the government shutdown an opportunity, but since it began, he’s been largely out of the public eye.
Instead of bringing Democrats to the table, the 79-year-old president has been posting a series of racist deepfake videos about Democratic congressional leaders.
On Thursday, Trump posted a bizarre AI-generated video that depicted Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, as the Grim Reaper as music plays in the background with lyrics “here comes the reaper.”
Vought on Friday announced on X that more than $2 billion for infrastructure in Chicago had been paused. That’s on top of his previously announced $18 billion for New York infrastructure and $8 billion for green energy projects in blue states, which have been canceled since the shutdown began.
The White House argued Vought has been tasked with making cuts in response to the shutdown, but press secretary Karoline Leavitt would not commit to the funds being restored should the shutdown end.
The White House has also signaled that mass layoffs of federal workers, likely in the thousands, were imminent.
While GOP congressional leaders have decried the shutdown as serious, they’ve struggled to explain the president posting memes and videos over the past few days.
Johnson squirmed when challenged by a reporter on Friday who asked how he could call the situation serious while also dismissing the president’s posts as him trying to have fun.
“The effects are very serious on real people, on real Americans. We support federal employees who do a great job in all these different areas, but what they’re trying to have fun with, trying to make light of, is to point out the absurdity of the Democrats’ position. And they’re using memes and all, you know, these tools of social media to do that,” Johnson said. “Some people find that entertaining, but at the end of the day, the decisions are hard ones. And I’m telling you, they’re not taking any pleasure in that.”
Republican leaders said they would not take up addressing health care as Democrats have been demanding until the government reopens.
After the Republican short-term spending bill failed in the Senate a fourth time on Friday, GOP leaders decided House members would not be called back to Washington for a second week in a row and would remain in their districts next week.
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