In one of my favorite videos on YouTube, a group of African mercenaries are sitting around a campfire with a chimpanzee. One of them thinks it would be amusing to hand the chimp a loaded AK-47. It takes the weapon, and after dancing around with it a bit, puts its finger on the trigger and starts firing randomly around the campsite. The mercenaries go frantically scurrying off in all directions. That is how we can view President Donald Trump’s noble stewardship of the nation’s economic policy.

We’re heard a lot about the vile Stephen Miller, whose self-appointed mission is to persecute people of color—and US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who puts a legal seal of approval on whatever the president chooses to do. Now we are hearing more about a third monkey, Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, who is superintending the MAGA shutdown of the federal government.

Vought’s last major bout of notoriety came via his lead role in marshaling the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term—a massive document laying out a detailed plan to subject most of the country to Christian nationalist persecution fantasies that became so reviled that Trump denied any connection to it, or even knowledge of what it was. Despite knowing nothing about it, he also said he agreed with some it and disagreed with other parts. Now Trump is promoting Vought, in one of his Truth Social posts about the fallout from the government shutdown, as “he of PROJECT 2025 fame”; just to drive the point home, Trump then posted an AI video depicting Vought as the Grim Reaper, and exulted that the shutdown would unleash a fresh torrent of assaults on federal workers and agencies.

In reality, the shutdown is the latest stage in the dismantling of the federal non-defense public sector—the array of services and public goods that Trump guru Steve Bannon called “the administrative state” and targeted for elimination. One reason that the latest MAGA siege on American governance hasn’t been that difficult to carry out is that the federal sector has been steadily hollowed out for decades, under the leadership of presidents from both parties, since Richard Nixon in 1970.

Federal employment is not far from where it was then, when the US population was much smaller and there was much less work for the feds to do. Back them, federal employment was as high as 3 million, as the Vietnam War raged. The most recent number is 2.9 million. Of that, about 1.4 million are in the fepartments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.

For all the talk of legions of intrusive bureaucrats, the federal government doesn’t actually do much. It mostly mails checks to medical care providers, Social Security beneficiaries, and state and local governments. That’s why a wag described it once as a giant insurance company with an army. If Vought succeeds with his latest round of attacks on federal agencies, it will do much less. In the wake of a half-century’s worth of steady federal downsizing, a random cut is more likely to hit muscle and bone, rather than fat, in actual services provided; that specter is less dire in the check mailing business—until, that is, Vought, Trump, and their cronies start in on additional cuts to income supports beyond those enacted in the massive tax-and-spending act that Trump signed into law this spring.

The cuts are routinely described by Vought as the elimination of “unconstitutional” implementation of “DEI” (diversity, equity, inclusion) policies. Since no analysis has been offered spelling out just what DEI is or what is supposedly unconstitutional about it, Vought is just saying, “We are doing this, and if you don’t like it, tough.” In less nuanced language, Trump has described the targets of cuts as “Democrat agencies” and what they do as a “scam.”

For all Trump’s claims about cutting spending people don’t like, his indiscriminate hits on employment and insurance coverage will wreak havoc in red states as well as blue ones. His promises to focus on governors who say unkind things about him disguise the reality that even a small reduction in employment or health care is more noticeable in one of the lower-population red states that wield clout in Congress disproportionate to their electoral size.

I worked in the federal government for the 2013 shutdown, which lasted from October 1 to October 17. It was a sweet paid vacation. I was able to volunteer and work for free at my old stomping ground, the Economic Policy Institute. It’s not clear whether those furloughed now will ever be made whole. What we have now amounts to another lockout. During my shutdown furlough, I suggested that the federal employee unions stage a “work-in,” continuing to serve the people. There was some interest, but it never came off. It would have been illegal, but imagine a DC jury punishing an employee for participating.

Some of the projected cuts falling under the Trump-Vought-Project 2025 mandate could have a more direct impact on economic growth. As the Congressional Budget Office explains, the longer the duration of a shutdown, the bigger the reduction or delay in federal spending, including to private sector contractors.