Trump Cuts Billions in Funding From Another Blue City in Revenge Tour

Russ Vought and the Trump administration’s shutdown revenge tour rolls on as they continue to make blue city residents suffer in an attempt to force Democrats to fold to their demands.

On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget director froze $2.1 billion in funding for Chicago infrastructure, blaming it on DEI and wokeness.

“$2.1 billion in Chicago infrastructure projects—specifically the Red Line Extension and the Red and Purple Modernization Project—have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting,” Vought wrote Friday on X. “More info to come soon from USDOT.”

The Department of Transportation blamed it directly on the government shutdown.

“Unfortunately, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ decision to shut down the government has negatively affected the Department’s staffing resources for carrying out this important analysis,” the department said. “We urge Democrats in Congress to stop holding the federal government’s budget hostage so USDOT can get back to the important work of the American people.”

Chicago is just the latest Democratic city to get hit. The Trump administration has already frozen $18 billion in infrastructure projects in New Jersey and New York, and announced cuts to $8 billion in energy funding from 16 blue states, as well.

It’s clear that this is a sort of hostage situation for Democrats: Give Republicans the awful austerity bill they want, or more people and more transportation projects get hurt.

“The Democrats should know that they put the White House and the president in this position,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said plainly on Thursday. “And if they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It’s very simple: Pass the clean continuing resolution, and all of this goes away.”

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker sounded off.

“At a time when federal agents are sowing chaos in Chicago, the Trump administration is holding bipartisan funding hostage,” he said on X. “It’s attempting to score political points but is instead hurting our economy and the hardworking people who rely on public transit to get to work or school.”

During Friday media appearances, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer tried to dance around questions about the weak labor market under President Donald Trump. But Fox News, of all outlets, wouldn’t let her get away with it.

Chavez-DeRemer told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that the shutdown sent “a momentum of jobs gains” to a “screeching halt.” The claim was too outrageous even for Bartiromo.

“Well, I mean, you know the data, though. You know where we are. I mean, we’ve had three months of slowing jobs,” the host observed, asking Chavez-DeRemer for a sense of the “jobs picture today.”

Chavez-DeRemer evaded, touting supposed investment, trade deals, and growth in gross domestic product under Trump, while expressing the importance of skilled workers. Finally getting around to the job numbers, she put it delicately: “So while we’ve seen the numbers kind of hold steady, the goal is to not stop the momentum.”

In reality, the jobs numbers haven’t been holding steady. Due to the government shutdown, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release its much-anticipated monthly jobs report for September on Friday, as planned. But other recent reports have been consistently disappointing.

This week, the BLS reported the worst hiring rate since June—and before that since before the pandemic and Great Recession era. Then the payroll-processing firm ADP found that the U.S. private sector lost jobs for the third time in four months, shedding 32,000 jobs in September.

In another media appearance later Friday morning, CNN’s John Berman didn’t let Chavez-DeRemer off the hook. When the labor secretary attributed poor job numbers to what the Trump administration “inherited from the Biden administration,” before lamenting that the ongoing shutdown slows the administration’s “momentum” to “grow those jobs numbers,” Berman challenged whether there is indeed any momentum.

“We have the strongest economy in the world,” Chavez-DeRemer insisted, leading Berman to cut in: “Jobs economy? Do we have the strongest jobs economy in the world? Do we have the strongest jobs economy compared to last year, when there were hundreds of thousands of jobs added each month?”

“Absolutely,” said Chavez-DeRemer, going on to blame the accuracy of BLS data—which recalls how Trump ousted the agency’s commissioner for a MAGA lackey following its abysmal July jobs report. “Because we saw those revisions under the Biden administration. That’s why this president has called on the modernization and streamlining of BLS to understand that we need modern information. We need to have accurate information.”

ICE may be watching your TikToks. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to build a 24/7 social media surveillance team in an effort to deport even more people. On Friday, Wired reported on planning documents showing that ICE is looking to hire 30 new private contractors to comb every major social media app to gain more info on where to stage their draconian, often violent raids.  

Targeted platforms will include X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit, but more niche sites could be on the list as well. The program will be run out of two sites, The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston, Vermont, and the Pacific Enforcement Response Center in Santa Ana, California.

ICE—whose main surveillance database is made by data company Palantir and last year signed a $2 million contract with Israeli spyware company Paragon—may also use AI in its hunt, according to federal contracting records. 

This is far from ICE’s first time engaging in dystopian levels of surveillance. But this 24-hour AI surveillance, adding to already present privacy issues in America, only points to this kind of program being used on citizens and noncitizens alike. 

Read more at Wired.

A third of the White House complex has been furloughed so far due to the government shutdown—but exactly whom the Trump administration has deemed mission critical provides a clearer picture on their near-term agenda.

All 45 staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency, for instance, were apparently too valuable to lose, as the agency was completely unscathed by the temporary employment suspension, according to a numerical breakdown of the furloughs obtained by Politico.

The Office of Management and Budget also escaped largely unscathed, maintaining 437 of its 530 employees.

The document obtained by Politico indicates DOGE’s workers and 49 employees at OMB are “exempt from the shutdown because their compensation comes from a source other than annual appropriations,” according to Politico.

Both departments gained fame earlier this year when their joint work supported a mass reorganization of federal employees, nixing thousands of civil servants from their roles across the executive branch.

Practically every other department in the White House complex will fare much worse, with some losing more than half of their staffers, according to the document.

The shutdown-induced damage has been seismic across the executive branch. So far, the shutdown has furloughed more than half a million federal employees, according to a New York Times monitor. That includes 89 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency, 87 percent of the Education Department, and 71 percent of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Forty-five percent of the civilian work force of the Defense Department has also been temporarily let go.

The president has been crystal clear in blaming Democrats for the critical congressional failure this week, publicly promising to target liberals in a forthcoming mass firing. On Tuesday, the Trump administration issued ideological messaging via executive agency heads to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the Hatch Act.

As federal agencies trumpet blatantly political messages blaming the “radical left” for the current government shutdown, FBI Director Kash Patel had a trainee fired for simply putting a gay pride flag on their desk.

In a letter dated Wednesday, Patel cited President Donald Trump’s Article 2 power to dismiss a trainee who the director said had “exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage” while working in Los Angeles, where the trainee had been assigned during the Biden administration.

Although the letter did not cite a specific infraction, three people familiar with the incident told MSNBC the trainee was fired for displaying a pride flag on their desk.

Under previous administrations, displaying a pride flag at one’s desk would not violate any FBI policy, two bureau veterans told CNN. But since entering office, Trump has taken significant efforts to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and to make it easier to discriminate in the workplace—summoning a flurry of lawsuits.

And federal employees have responded in kind. One person told MSNBC that FBI agents had warned colleagues after Trump entered office that the president’s loyalists in the bureau were searching through internal files for lists of LGBTQ employees. Even before Trump’s inauguration, agents and prosecutors warned one another to be careful about revealing their sexual orientation or support for the LGBTQ+ community to their new superiors.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that he had “no problem” with banning the progressive pride flag, which includes the colors of the transgender flag, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend claimed that “a lot of people are very threatened” by it. Wednesday’s firing comes as members of the Trump administration escalate rhetoric baselessly linking the transgender community to political violence, including a campaign for the FBI to adopt a new designation of “transgender ideology-inspired violence and extremism.”

Lawyer Alejandra Caraballo recently warned that under Trump, anything “as innocuous as a pride flag can cause a federal investigation now or people to lose their jobs.… The spectacle is there to create fear in everyone else that they need to comply or they are next.”