Letters from an American - October 7, 2025

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

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Hello, this is Michael Moss. I will be reading the letter for Heather Cox Richardson today. October 7, 2025. The Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, today floated the idea that workers furloughed during a government shutdown are not guaranteed back pay when the shutdown is resolved. Mark Caputo of Axios broke the story of the new OMB memo this morning. Caputo pointed out that in 2019, during the last government shutdown, President Donald Trump signed a law designed to make it clear that furloughed workers would get paid. Caputo notes that the OMB's new reading of the law is a major departure from the administration's

own guidance issued last month. Two people familiar with the administration's plans told Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post that officials are hoping the memo will give the Republicans more leverage against the Democrats in negotiations over the shutdown. Josh Marshall of Talking Points memo points out that OMB director Russell Vote had threatened mass firings if Democrats refused to go along with the Republicans' continuing resolution to fund the government. but the machinery for such firings does not appear to be in place.

Marshall notes that the government is, in fact, having to rehire many of the employees it fired early in the year. Now vote is threatening not to pay furloughed workers, but the 2019 law, a law Trump signed, is clear. Polls show that most Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown and that 98% of Americans want to see the president, premium tax credits, the issue of health care costs on which the Democrats are making a stand extended. That the administration is concerned about the health care issue showed in Trump's

statement to reporters yesterday that we have a negotiation going on right now with the Democrats that could lead to very good things with regard to health care. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, said, Trump's claim isn't true, but if he's finally ready to work with Democrats will be at the table. Of the threat to withhold back pay for furloughed employees, a senior White House official told Caputo, OMB is in charge. The power being wielded by unelected officials in the Trump administration echoes the conditions of the U.S. government a century ago. In 1920, Republicans won a landslide victory. They put the handsome back-slapping Warren G. Harding in the White House in what was widely interpreted as the

country's desire to leave the years of World War I behind them and to stop having to listen to President Woodrow Wilson's preaching at them. One journalist called Wilson, a frozen flame of righteous intelligence. Old school Republicans who rejected the party's early 20th century progressivism won control of Congress. But the victory offered no clear direction for the country. Party leaders had put Harding at the head of the ticket because he was from Ohio, whose loss in 1916 had cost the Republicans the presidency. Harding celebrated his anti-intellectualism and the fact that, even after a world war, he knew nothing about Europe. He told one of his secretaries he couldn't make heads or tails over fights over taxes,

and he was such a terrible speaker that one man commented that his speaker, that his speaker, leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes those meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork. Harding could not manage his corrupt appointees, who became known as the Ohio gang, and spent much of his time drinking and playing poker upstairs at the White House. In the absence of a strong president, the power of the government could have flowed to Congress. But congressional Republicans had spent 20 years obstructing the progressive presidents

who had been in the White House since 2001. First Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, then Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Republicans in Congress had become skilled at a obstruction, but once in power, they split into factions and quarreled among themselves. Into the vacuum stepped administration officers, notably Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. With them at the helm, the government implemented pro-business policies that would turn the government over to businessmen. Eight years later, the conflagration of the Great Crash and the ensuing Great Depression,

illustrated just how misguided the abdication of elected lawmakers from their duties had been. In the second Trump administration, the president does not seem especially interested in governance. He seems to want to use the government to persecute those he considers his enemies and to protect and enrich himself. Attorney General Pam Bondi encapsulated that approach to the government when she appeared today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She refused to answer questions, instead attacking Democratic senators. Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California,

pointed out that Bondi refused to answer whether she consulted with career ethics lawyers before approving a gift of a $400 million airplane for Trump from Qatar. Who asked that Trump's name be flagged in the episode? files, whether Borders'ar, Tom Homan kept the $50,000 bribe he took for promising to steer contracts toward the men who offered the money, whether Korea prosecutors found insufficient evidence to charge former FBI director James Comey with lying to Congress, how military strikes on boats in the Caribbean are legal, and so on. Many observers noticed something else, though.

Bondi refused to answer a specific question about Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Senator Sheldon White House, a Democrat of Rhode Island, asked, there has been public reporting that Jeffrey Epstein showed people photos of President Trump with half-naked young women. Do you know if the FBI found those photographs in their search of Jeffrey Epstein's safe or premises or otherwise? Have you seen any such? thing. Bondi, who says she has seen the files, would not answer no. Instead, she accused White House of trying to slander President Trump. If Trump were not going to use the power of the government

for the good of the American people, Republicans in Congress could have picked up the power that he let fall. But they have chosen not to exercise their constitutional duties, instead going along with what White House officials want. With their abdication, power appears to have flowed to unelected officials, first to billionaire Elon Musk, and now to OMB director Russell Vote, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As the senior White House official told Caputo, OMB is in charge. but those officials were not elected

and are operating according to deeply unpopular ideologies. Miller has been pushing the idea that those opposed to the administration are engaged in insurrection against the United States and reporters are increasingly questioning Trump about whether he would invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act.

That law permits a president to override the 1870s, Posse Cometatis Act that forbids the government from using federal troops against U.S. citizens to enforce the law. Trump's advisors prevented him from invoking the Insurrection Act in his first term, but he seems open to the idea again, falsely suggesting that democratic cities are, as he described Portland, Oregon, war ravaged. Today, in an interview with CNN, Miller went further, claiming that the

the president has plenary authority, that is, complete, unchecked power to use the military to put down an insurrection. Miller stopped talking, oddly, in mid-sentence after making that claim, leaving this exception to the rule his final phrase. The claim that exceptions to the rule reveal where true power rests in a society is central to the philosophy of Karl Schmidt, a German political scientist who joined the Nazis. Today, six former surgeons general, appointed by every Democratic and Republican president since George H.W. Bush, took to the pages of the Washington Post to condemn Kennedy's actions at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Jocelyn Elders, Vivek

Murthy, Antonia Novello, and David Satcher wrote that their oaths to care for patients and to protect the health of all Americans compelled them to say that Kennedy's actions are endangering the health of the nation. The consequences of his mismanagement and promoting misinformation, they say, will be measured in lives lost, disease outbreaks, and erosion of public trust that will take years to rebuild. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.

Thank you.