As Washington enters a government shutdown, the Trump administration has erected safeguards to ensure President Donald Trump’s most hardline priorities continue unscathed.
Agencies central to Trump’s agenda are shielding certain programs by declaring the federal employees who work on them essential or sheltering them under already approved funding streams — designations that will allow them to keep running through the funding lapse.
That means offices tasked with immigration enforcement and tariff negotiations, two hallmarks of Trump’s presidency, will retain significantly more staff than they have in prior shutdowns, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency documents submitted to the White House in recent days and interviews with current and former administration officials. That’s even as hundreds of thousands of federal workers are sent home, hampering a variety of government functions including some routine food safety inspections, Social Security benefit verifications and the publication of employment numbers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The split underscores how Trump hopes to punish Democrats by pinning the fallout on them while ensuring his own priorities continue unimpeded. It’s also the latest example of how his administration uses the levers of federal power in unprecedented ways to enact the president’s expansive policy agenda.
“Remember Rahm Emanuel’s great quote: ‘You should never waste a crisis,’” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Rahm Emanuel should be proud of the Trump team because they’re prepared to say, ‘Every day this is shut, we will find ways to pay for everything we want. We’ll find ways to eliminate everything you want. And we’ll do it legally.’”
Some of Trump’s pet projects, like NASA’s Artemis moonshot program, will continue during the shutdown. So will some major GOP policy priorities, such as processing Interior Department applications for permits to drill or conduct fossil fuel projects.
One first-term Trump official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the administration will be “strategic” in its approach on what to fund.
“If something is going to put a kink in Trump’s agenda even for a couple of days, they will find a creative way to make that work,” the official said.
Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have made preparations to use the shutdown to conduct yet another mass culling of the federal workforce. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, tried to use the shutdown threat to force talks on extending soon-to-expire health insurance subsidies.
“The last person that wants to shut down is us,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Now, with that being said, we can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible — that are bad for them and irreversible by them. Like cutting vast numbers of people out. Cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”
While the party controlling Washington typically suffers politically during a shutdown, polling shows significant peril for Democrats: A new New York Times-Siena College poll found that 65 percent of respondents, including 43 percent of Democrats, think Democrats shouldn’t allow a government shutdown, even if their demands aren’t met.
White House aides are confident that their preparations will help them weather the shutdown storm while Democrats bear the brunt of the fallout from angry federal workers and constituents.
“There are already approved appropriations, some part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, that will not lapse as part of a government shutdown the way that other funding will. It’s less so that the administration is trying to somehow manipulate this,” said a White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the administration’s strategy. “We want everything to continue, but ultimately when there is a shutdown, some funding will lapse. And there is nothing we can do about that. That is 100 percent on the Democrats.”
All core immigration enforcement operations — from Border Patrol to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will continue without interruption, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss agency planning. Law enforcement personnel in past shutdowns have been considered essential, but ICE, for example, is further buffered by mandatory funding included in the One Big Beautiful Bill.
New agents hired under Republicans’ tax and domestic policy law will continue to be paid. But the agency is also working to ensure other law enforcement officials — who would otherwise not be paid until Congress passes a new funding bill — can get paid via OBBB funding, one of the officials said. The agency is also prepared to furlough less staff than in years past to ensure the administration’s work to implement the bill isn’t delayed.
“ICE will be fine during a shutdown,” said one of the administration officials. “Most of what ICE does will continue.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s 2025 shutdown plan calls for a higher percentage of its total employees to be retained during a shutdown than its 2023 plan — 95 percent now compared to 88 percent two years ago. DHS in its 2025 plan also expanded the number of employees it can retain by law during a shutdown by roughly 2,300.
Trump’s signature tariff agenda also stands to continue uninterrupted as his administration pushes forward high-stakes trade talks with China and India and hashes out a host of other deals, like those with Japan and South Korea. Both the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office make clear in their shutdown plans that they will continue advancing the president’s trade agenda, a departure from previous years when trade was largely deemed a non-essential function that could be put on the backburner during a shutdown.
Commerce, for instance, is allowing import licensing for steel and aluminium products, investigations around sector-based tariffs and export control activities to continue without exception, none of which were explicitly protected activities in its 2023 shutdown plan.
USTR, meanwhile, plans to continue administering tariff programs established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, according to a draft plan posted and removed from its website in recent days. While those tariffs are being challenged in court, the Trump administration has declared trade deficits with other countries a threat to national security, a rationale USTR is also using in its decision to continue trade talks.
USTR is also retaining 60 percent of its workforce during a shutdown, compared to just 40 percent in its 2024 plan. Last year, the agency said that only four full-time employees were required to carry out necessary duties during a shutdown compared to 118 employees that received such a designation this year, nearly half of USTR’s staff.
While Trump has indicated that his administration intends to inflict pain on Democrats, there are limits to how much it can do without hurting GOP voters.
“To hit blue states specifically, you’d want to target the federal bureaucracy — which is primarily represented by Dems. That’s what I think the mass firings are all about — max pain on Dems,” the first-term Trump official said. “Otherwise, I don’t see a lot that can be done to Dems that wouldn’t hurt [Republican] states.”
And despite instructions from Vought, the White House budget director, that agencies prepare reduction-in-force plans for a shutdown, most plans continue to detail only the number of workers it plans to furlough, not specifics for permanent firings.
While the administration worked to safeguard its favored programs, plenty of other functions across the government are frozen.The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, is suspending all operations — including the release of the monthly jobs report that often serves as a key indicator of the economy’s health. While such a provision has been included in previous shutdown plans, it is noteworthy in the current climate after Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer following a disappointing jobs report — and as economic anxiety remains high.
The Food and Drug Administration’s Animal Drugs and Foods Program is halting pre-market safety reviews of novel animal food ingredients for livestock, and “thus be unable to ensure that the meat, milk, and eggs of livestock are safe for people to eat.”
