Cabinet leaders detail how the government shutdown is impacting their agencies

Senior administration officials outlined how the ongoing government shutdown is affecting operations in the agencies they lead during a Thursday Cabinet meeting that focused primarily on the peace agreement between Israel and Hamas. 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned that work on nuclear weapon modernization would be stalled if funding doesn’t resume in the coming days. 

“In the next six, seven days, we're going to run out of funding, and the retooling of our nuclear stockpile, the ultimate guarantor of our sovereignty, is going to be underfunded,” he said. “We're going to have to slow down and creep to a crawl these efforts.” 

According to Energy’s shutdown plan, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency responsible for safeguarding the nuclear stockpile, is continuing to perform safety activities related to weapon maintenance, international non-proliferation and naval reactors. 

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins also said the government needed to reopen in order to provide assistance to farmers, some of whom have been hurt financially due to the tit-for-tat tariffs with China. And Attorney General Pam Bondi emphasized that federal law enforcement officers are still “working without paychecks round the clock to keep and make America safe.” 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy did not speak at the meeting, but he has previously reported that there’s been a slight uptick in air traffic controllers calling in sick. 

The federal government has been shut down since Oct. 1 due to a disagreement between congressional Democrats and Republicans over whether to include Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies in a measure to continue agency funding. 

Vice President JD Vance argued during the meeting that Senate Democrats’ refusal to back a bill without the subsidies is putting funding at risk for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, that provides food aid to low-income households. He added that the Trump administration is prioritizing making “the shutdown as painless as possible on the American people.” 

While his officials were elucidating the ways that the shutdown harms agencies, the president reiterated his threat to use the lapse in funding to eliminate parts of the government that he objects to. 

“We'll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren't popular with Republicans, frankly, because that's the way it works,” Trump said. “[Democrats] wanted to do this, so they’ll get a little taste of their own medicine.” 

Ahead of the shutdown, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought issued a memo spelling out plans to implement reductions in force if funding lapsed. More than a week into the shutdown, however, mass layoffs have not occurred. The Trump administration has already been removing swaths of the civil service since virtually the start of his second term. 

OMB also has argued that furloughed federal employees are not required to receive back pay once the government reopens in apparent contravention with a 2019 law. Legal experts and bipartisan lawmakers have criticized the Trump administration’s new interpretation of the requirement.