Last week, two federal judges ordered that thousands of federal workers, who were on probationary status when they were fired, be rehired at 18 federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Education. The rulings came a day after the Department of Education announced massive staff cuts, part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce.
Democratic Oregon US Senator Jeff Merkley joins us to discuss the mass firings of federal workers, as well as the vote on the stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown and possible cuts to Medicaid that House Republicans are considering that could directly impact care for 1.4 million Oregonians.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with Oregon Democratic U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley. Merkley was not one of the nine Democrats who voted for a Republican stopgap funding bill on Friday. That vote prevented a government shutdown but incensed many fellow Democrats and their constituents. Jeff Merkley joins us now to talk about his “no” vote and the larger context of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle huge portions of the federal government. Senator Merkley, welcome back.
Senator Merkley: It’s good to be with you.
Miller: I want to start with that recent drama in your chamber. Why did you vote against that Republican spending bill?
Merkley: You don’t stop a bully by handing over your lunch money and you don’t stop a tyrant by giving them more power.
Miller: Do you stop a party that, in a lot of ways, wants to shut down parts of government by shutting down all of the government?
Merkley: Well, that wasn’t really the set of options. There were three options. One is to pass the Republican-only Continuing Resolution that we’ve never done before. It’s always been bipartisan because of the power to have a bi-partisan requirement in the Senate.
The second was to put off our proposal for 30 days, keep the government open to pass the spending bills. Those spending bills, all 12 of them, came out with huge bipartisan support, most of them unanimously out of the Senate spending committee, the Appropriations Committee. So we had the whole plan ready to roll.
And the third option was to vote “no,” and be in the shutdown, and say, “Oh, well, we need to get out of the shutdown.” That was the option that Sen. Schumer feared, but that wasn’t the only option on the table.
Miller: But with the House not even in D.C., how would option two have worked?
Merkley: It only takes one day for them to get back.
Miller: But … did they give any indication they would have?
Merkley: Well, here’s the thing. There were two fears, if you will. One of the fears was that Trump’s megaphone would result in blaming Democrats, and that’s just absurd. We know from the 2019 shutdown that Trump suffered enormously politically. We knew that Trump had been lobbying the House to make sure there was not a Trump shutdown, because he had been hurt by a shutdown before and because he said it would shut down DOGE. He had his vice president lobbying against the shutdown as well.
So given that experience and given that the polling showed that Independents, by a 29% margin, already were blaming Republicans for a potential shutdown, the fear that Democrats would be blamed was just way out of sync with the facts.
Miller: But, how do you square that with, it would have been very easy for Republicans to say, “Hey, we passed this in the House and we had the votes in the Senate. Democrats literally were the ones who didn’t vote for this and it is because of them that the government has shut down.” How do you square that? That’s what the message would have been.
Merkley: They tried that message before. It didn’t work. And if we were going back to the floor every two hours saying, “Unanimous consent; open the government for 30 days to pass a bipartisan bill. That’s what America wants,” we would have seen the Republicans voting against opening up the government time after time, multiple times a day.
It would have really reinforced the instinct that people already had, because they can see that Republicans control the Oval Office, the House and the Senate, so it’s natural to blame the party in power.
Miller: Are you basically saying that this was not just wrong in terms of policy, but a political miscalculation …
Merkley: Absolutely. A hundred percent.
Miller: … on your Minority leader’s part, that he blinked. But you’re saying that if Democrats had stayed strong, you would have forced Republicans in the House to come back and accept some kind of Democratic participation in the stopgap budget.
Merkley: Well, here’s what we know. The worse that a shutdown is and the longer it lasts, the more people blame the party in power. So our Republican colleagues were very, very concerned about the fact that if there was any sort of extended shutdown, that it would be terrible for the American people and that therefore it would be terrible for them politically.
Miller: But what about the argument that Chuck Schumer put forward, that a shutdown would have given this administration even more power than it has now, because they could unilaterally decide what’s essential, what’s not, what to fund and what not, in ways that wouldn’t be subject to the kind of judicial review that we’ve already seen. And his argument – this is what he said in an interview over the weekend – that might mean that Republicans would say, “Let’s let the shutdown that we have some control over go on for six months, nine months or a year.” He made that argument over the weekend.
Merkley: Yeah, he made that argument. I just completely disagree with him. The worse the shutdown is, the more the American people would rally against it, the more pressure the Republicans would feel, the faster they’d come back to the table.
Listen, when you are in a fight with a bully, you can decide to run and hide, or you can decide to take them on. What we know about the world, and watching the disintegration of republics around the world, is that when you hand more power to the executive hoping that you can fight them later, the problem is they have more power later.
And in that Republican bill, they did not have the tables for the distribution of funds around the country and fund after fund.
Take something like the Great American Outdoors Act – those funds go to help us with public places, make them better for recreation, for the environment all over the country. But without a table, it means that all the funds could go to red states. The president would have all of these slush funds, massive amounts of slush funds, to be able to reward states he likes and hurt states he doesn’t, or to pressure members of Congress he thinks are getting out of line.
Miller: Let me make sure I understand the point you’re making. You’re saying that, unlike most Congressional authorizations for funding that you’ve seen, or stopgap funding measures like this … those are more normally filled in, and Congress says, “Spend this much money on this area, this much … ” In this one you’re saying a lot more is left up to the executive to actually control those purse strings?
Merkley: Yes, Senator Murray, the head of the spending committee, is making this point very powerfully. This is a massive slush fund for the president to exert more and more pressure on Congress, giving him enormous additional power. It’s the one thing you shouldn’t do.
Miller: Apropos of this, our listener Pat Sherman from Roseburg emailed to ask if you support replacing Senator Schumer as Minority leader.
Merkley: Well, there’s an election every two years, that’s a long way away. But what I will say is this: We are going to go through the same exercise at the end of September, because this funding bill goes through the end of September. We cannot repeat the same mistake that we made last week.
Miller: I want to turn to some recent executive actions. You serve on the Senate subcommittee that provides oversight to the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Can you give us a sense for what is happening there right now?
Merkley: Well, it’s all bad news. We are very concerned about the firing of employees. We’re very concerned about funds being withheld. There’s an enormous amount of depression among those who are working at the Environmental Protection Agency. We really saw that they were a prime target in the Trump administration, number one. They were also a prime target in Project 2025 that Russell Vought was the architect of. He would say, hey, I want to make sure that all of our employees for the government just feel terrible, feel like they are villains. And he particularly had it out for the EPA.
So we’re seeing a lot of concern … there’s been a whole series of proposals put forward to reverse protections. Those proposals will go through a public comment period. Those are their drafts, then they’ll become final. We will fight them at every step.
Miller: How do you think about your work on just this one subcommittee, when it seems like the core mission of the agency is being radically redefined to promote deregulation instead of environmental protection? I mean, that’s essentially the stated position of the administrator of the agency.
Merkley: Yeah, the subcommittee meets only at the call of the Chair. The Chair is not inclined to carry on this fight, so we’re gonna have to carry on the fight through the floor, maybe through the Congressional Review Act, to force votes on whether to undo the regulations that Trump is … keep the regulations that exist by undoing his reversals. But the committee itself will probably not be a big player in this.
Miller: In recent weeks, we have talked about cuts at a few agencies that might have an outsized impact on our region – that includes NOAA, the National Weather Service, the Forest Service, the Bonneville Power Administration. We could spend a while on each of these issues, but how are you triaging information right now?
Merkley: Well, this is a challenge because four or five new things happen every single day. And one of the things I’m encouraging people to do is keep understanding the core architecture. The core architecture is to create an imperial presidency, to create a strongman presidency, to ignore the laws that are written as to behavior. For example, the laws say you can’t fire inspector generals without a month’s notice and cause, but the administration fired 17 or 18 inspector generals. They didn’t care that they were violating the law as written.
They’re impounding funds without caring about the fact that that’s unconstitutional. In fact, Russell Vought’s goal, the head of OMB and the architect of Project 2025, he wants to put this in the hands of the Supreme Court and have the Supreme Court say, you know what, we see the Constitution differently than any other court has ever seen it and we’re going to give the president a lot more power to suspend funds or move funds between departments.
That’s what he’s after. He was very clear with me when I met with him before he was confirmed, that that was what he was after. So he did have transparency. He was straightforward about it. He’s trying to create this imperial presidency and if we don’t apply ourselves vigorously to this, we’re going to end up losing our republic as we know it.
Miller: Well, what is the mechanism that you’re suggesting for how to respond to that? What you just outlined, it seems like, broadly, the way the framers envisioned this … the Executive does something, it’s challenged, the Judiciary says, “Yep, it’s OK, it does not go against the Constitution.” If that were to happen, then what are you saying you need to do?
Merkley: Well, this is exactly the opposite of what the framers envisioned. That’s why Article I is the Congress. Congress writes the bills, not the president. The president isn’t allowed to impound funds. That was reinforced by the court following President Nixon trying to impound funds. So they really saw the executive as implementing the vision laid out by the people’s body, Congress. And creating an imperial presidency, where those laws are just a suggestion or a guidance, is exactly the opposite of what the framers intended.
Miller: Just to sharpen my question, to make sure that it was clear – my point wasn’t that this is what the framers meant in terms of the overall policies. But in terms of deference to different branches and judicial review, what you’re describing is different than the administration ignoring the 2nd Court of Appeals ruling, saying, “you have to actually give these funds, you did this illegally,” and then ignoring that. In the scenario you just outlined, it would be the Supreme Court itself saying, “yes, we are OK with this.” What I’m wondering is what you do if the Supreme Court is OK with it?
Merkley: That’s right. That is an ultimate fear. So, we have three instruments to push back against this imperial presidency. One is using all of our rules in Congress and our bully pulpit in Congress. All of us have social media. All of us can attend rallies. All of us can put a spotlight on what’s going on. We can use the floor of the Senate, all of that.
The second is the courts themselves. The lower courts have been pretty vigilant. They are following the precedents that exist from before. Our concern is getting to the Supreme Court, and I’ll come back to that in a moment.
The third is the people. And people are turning out in incredible numbers, with incredible passion at my town hall. I held two of them yesterday at a size I’ve never seen in Jackson and Josephine County before. Josephine is not considered a particularly liberal part of the state.
Miller: Both of those counties, Josephine much more so, went for President Trump in 2024.
Merkley: Yes, so you have a situation where people are saying, “What can we do?” And I’m telling them three things. First of all, get off the couch. You can’t change the world by getting in a fetal position and hoping it will change. Second of all, hold your officials accountable. Give them a hard time. Tell them how worried you are, show up outside their offices later this spring, show up in Washington, D.C. Third of all, join an affinity group, because by yourself you can just be depressed and lonely and ineffective, but with a group, you can be energized and you carry much more weight. And the response to that is tremendous. We’re seeing people organize at an unprecedented scale.
Now we go back to the Supreme Court. The reason we’re concerned about the court and the reason Russell Vought is hopeful is last year they found some invisible ink in the Constitution. That invisible ink said, despite what the founder’s vision was and despite what the apparent writing is in the Constitution, they discovered that the president is immune from committing a crime as long as he calls it a “government act,” which means that he could kill you, Dave Miller, and as long as he writes a writ saying this is a government act, he is completely immune from prosecution. This should terrify people.
And we’re seeing it now because, for example, over the last couple of days, a judge said, “You can’t send this plane of folks back to Venezuela because you didn’t go through the appropriate deportation protocols.” And what did Trump do? He just ignored the court and sent them anyway. So if you start ignoring the lower courts, that is a huge violation of norms we really haven’t seen. And then, if the Supreme Court weighs in and finds new invisible ink in the Constitution that creates this imperial presidency, our republic is in deep, deep trouble. It’s going to take massive citizen action, producing a very different outcome in the next elections if we’re going to save our country.
Miller: I want to come back, before we’re done, to the points you’re making here. But just to dig into one other specific point that’s going to actually loom large in the coming months … We had former Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber on the show on Friday. He disagrees with the idea of across-the-board cuts to Medicaid, but he did agree with the Republican argument that system cost increases have to be reined in to make it sustainable.
He wants to see Congress encourage every state to adopt something like Oregon’s coordinated care organizations, the CCO model of the Oregon Health Plan. What do you think about that idea?
Merkley: It’s a great idea. I’m writing the bill right now so that any state that wants to do this – and quite a few have already followed Oregon’s model – don’t have to get a waiver to do it. Instead, it would be an automatic option to follow the way we’ve gone.
What we did was something very risky in that we got a big loan on the front end and then said, hey, our CCO model will really cut down costs, we’ll repay that loan. I think it was like $1.9 billion. It was a scary loan for the state to undertake, but it worked. Now other states have followed our lead, but they have to get a waiver. And given how difficult this new administration is in letting states do anything that makes Medicaid actually work well, we need to make it an automatic option, not something you have to get a waiver for. And that’s what the bill will do that I’m crafting right now.
Miller: Publicly, Republican lawmakers have either been 100% supportive of the president’s policies or very quiet, when in recent weeks things like tariff fears have tanked the stock market, or federal agency chaos is alarming people sometimes in their districts. But that’s publicly. What are you hearing privately from Republican colleagues behind the scenes?
Merkley: They’re extremely worried. And let me just give you an example: the confirmation of Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. He’s a man who is still struggling with alcohol. He’s attacked women. He said that women shouldn’t be in the military. He’s disparaged all kinds of minority groups and he shouldn’t have gotten a single vote.
But this is where Trump said, if you aren’t with the team, I’m going to make life hard for you, including using Elon Musk’s millions or billions to attack you in your next primary. So a number of members were just like, “well, I guess the president deserves to have the Cabinet he wants.” Well, no, he doesn’t deserve to have it.
That’s the whole point of having confirmation with the Senate, was to keep folks who were unprepared academically or in life experience, or who were corrupt or who were unsuitable, from being appointed – that’s the whole point of having that confirmation. So they’re really failing in their constitutional responsibility, but they’re terrified. And that pressure on Congress from a president, we have never seen that level of direct threats against members, trying to keep them in line.
Miller: It’s not the first time that a president has twisted people’s arms to get them to vote, but you’re saying that the level is different?
Merkley: Yeah, it’s on a whole different scale.
Miller: In another way, Donald Trump is a lame duck president. Maybe that phrase makes more sense normally after the midterms in someone’s second term. But I’m just wondering how you assess the tightness of his grip on his party and if you think it will lessen, if the fear of going against the president will be consistent in the coming years?
Merkley: What is making this particularly effective now are the media bubbles that we have in the United States. Member after member of the Republican caucus will say something along the lines of, “I know what he’s doing is despicable, but the majority of my base loves what they’re hearing.” And what they’re hearing is straight off Fox News. And groups to the right of that are saying, “Hey, he’s doing nothing wrong, he’s using the power of the presidency in aggressive fashion to accomplish the things he campaigned on.”
They’re hearing that in their social media, they’re hearing that on cable television, they’re hearing that from their friends who are watching the same media that they’re watching. And that development, where we have these separate media bubbles in America, is a huge problem for democracy. You think about the town square, where we can envision the founders coming, the communities getting together and arguing out cases. There was no algorithm. Everybody got to have their say, everybody got to hear what everyone else was saying. But now, people hear some stuff that creates two different visions of the universe, and creates a big separation between the blue team and the red team, and a demonization of each.
And then it’s social media. The algorithms mean that people get fed the stuff that they’re already looking at, and there’s enormous power in that, in suppressing dialogue. So we really have a problem having a national conversation about where we’re headed, and it reinforces the challenge for Republican Senators to take on the president.
Miller: Well, that’s part of your diagnosis, this fractured media environment. What’s your proposal, what’s your solution?
Merkley: Well, I’ll tell you, this has come up at almost every town hall. And it is an enormous problem that we don’t have an answer to. It is a new feature of communication technology in this country. We never envisioned that this would evolve in this way.
When we had three networks that were broadcasting, we had a fairness doctrine. People always started with the same basic facts. Those facts were often wrong. We were fed a lot of misinformation about the Vietnam War, for example, and we had big differences interpreting those facts. We had big differences in civil rights, we had big differences on the Vietnam War, but we started with the same basic information.
Now, we don’t. And no one has an easy solution to this.
Miller: Jeff Merkley, thanks very much.
Merkley: It’s a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
Miller: Jeff Merkley is one of Oregon’s two Democratic U.S. Senators.
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