The current shutdown in Washington is playing out on two levels. One is a game of chicken over government spending priorities, as the two political parties shape their messages for next year’s congressional elections.
The government has been shut down temporarily while the two parties spar over the new fiscal year’s budget and play their usual blame game.
The other bout involves a much more brutal scheme by the Trump administration to reshape the structure and role of the federal government and expand presidential power at the expense of the other branches.
Shrinking and shuttering
It calls for shrinking and shuttering a broad array of federal programs and agencies, and shrinking the federal bureaucracy while making it more subject to presidential dictates.
It involves a sweeping plan to restructure the very foundation of American society and government with an extremist Christian nationalist blueprint – potentially bad news for Jews and every other religious minority.
The plan is Project 2025, and its authors are calling it “the second American Revolution.” The revolution “will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” threatened Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind the manifesto that US President Donald Trump is trying to impose on the federal government.
Congress couldn't agree
The federal government was shut down on October 1 because the Congress couldn’t agree on a spending bill for the new fiscal year that began that day. Specifically, Republicans unanimously rejected Democrats’ demands to restore health care benefits that had been deleted in the misnamed Big Beautiful Bill.
This is also the GOP’s latest move in a 15-year so-far-unsuccessful effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Having lost dozens of earlier attempts, now they’re trying to starve it by cutting off tax credits that help some 22 million Americans pay for their health insurance through the ACA.
Both sides see the shutdown providing a strong issue for next year’s congressional elections – cutting spending and immigration vs protecting healthcare. Democrats are defending a popular program, while Republicans are falsely accusing them of trying to provide free health coverage for illegal immigrants.
Project 2025
Candidate Trump insisted he knew nothing of Project 2025 – until he began implementing it once he won his second term. The force behind the plan, which has been called a Christian nationalist blueprint for reshaping the federal government, is Russell Vought. He is the main brain behind the presidential Sharpie producing an avalanche of executive orders to implement the scheme.
Vought’s title is budget director, the same job he held in the first Trump term, and the lead executioner and enforcer of the plan. He is first among many Project 2025 authors who found high-level jobs in the new administration.
They include border czar Tom Homan, CIA director John Ratcliffe, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, Security and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins, Vought’s chief of staff Paul Dans, attorney-general Pam Bondi, and senior White House aides Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, and Karoline Leavitt.
Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, told Fox News on the eve of the shutdown: “We have the authority to make permanent change in the bureaucracy here in government.” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told The Hill that Vought has been “dreaming” of this shutdown “since puberty.”
'Irreversible things'
To Trump, the shutdown is an opportunity to “do things… that are irreversible.” He said he’s been meeting with Vought “of Project 2025 fame” to discuss “which of the many Democrat agencies” they can cut.
Trump has encountered little pushback from a subservient GOP-led Congress, even as tens of thousands of their constituents are laid off. Government workers with the temerity to object have often found themselves out of a job.
Many of Trump’s moves have met legal challenges, but he has reason to be confident a friendly and sympathetic Supreme Court majority will give him much of what he wants.
The Interfaith Alliance says: “Project 2025 is informed by an overarching assumption that US law, government, and policy should be informed by Christian nationalist teachings and morality.”
Day of rest
Project 2025 states that “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,” referring exclusively to Sunday, as opposed to the days of rest for Jews and other religions.
Last year, Project 2025 was dismissed as a bunch of far-out think-tank ideas, even by Trump, who called it “severe Right” and said he had no intention of reading it. However, today it is being implemented by many of its authors, whom he put in top administration posts.
The non-profit, non-partisan Kettering Foundation has said its 2025’s “central agenda is to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States.”
The manifesto explicitly calls for tearing down the wall of separation between religion and state, and infusing the federal government with “biblical principles,” notably that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
Calling the plan “vengeful in tone,” the group says, “its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights, and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs.”
Abortion ban
Other conservative Christian doctrines that it promotes include a nationwide abortion ban, prioritizing a woman’s role in the home and in motherhood, rescinding protection of LGBTQ+ rights, banning "gender-affirming care" as “child abuse,” and an emphasis on religious and ideological loyalty in federal hiring.
The manifesto portrays anyone who opposes its sweeping ambitions as being enemies of our republic, a charge Trump has used frequently against the media and other critics.
Under Project 2025, America would change from a beacon of democracy to a superpower version of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, now a Christian nationalist autocracy, Kettering noted. Trump has called himself a friend and admirer of Orban.
The budget impasse will be resolved, but the plan to shut down American democracy is going full speed ahead.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.