The government shutdown has been dragging on for two weeks. It’s been a dystopian stretch for America’s military and veteran community. The stoppage, led by President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress, has frozen military pay, leaving active-duty military families wondering how they will pay their mortgages, feed their kids, and afford life-saving medicine.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently went on C-SPAN, where he fielded a question from an American whose husband serves, and who suffers from PTSD from two tours in Afghanistan. She was not happy, noting that if they miss a paycheck their children won’t be able to get the medication they need to survive. “As a Republican, I’m very disappointed in my party, and I’m very disappointed in you, because you have the power to call the House back,” the caller said. “You refuse to do that just for a show.”
Johnson responded by saying he was sorry and blaming Democrats.
Trump also blamed Democrats in a Truth Social post a few days later, writing that the administration has “identified funds” to pay the troops. Congress has appropriated those funds elsewhere, though, and it’s unclear if the president can redirect them. Regardless, the uncertainty has military families literally worried for their lives as Republicans continue to keep the government closed over their insistence on gutting Medicaid, the health care program serving low-income and disabled Americans.
Veterans are also being squeezed. The Trump administration has announced mass layoffs across the federal work source, which employs one third of veterans, many of which are disabled. Several Department of Veterans Affairs programs have ceased operating during the shutdown, as well. The fact that the layoffs will disproportionately affect the men and women who have served doesn’t seem to be of any concern to the president.
The Office of Management and Budget — headed by Project 2025 mastermind Russell Vought — confirmed Friday that “substantial” reductions in force, or RIFs, have begun across multiple federal agencies, including the Departments of Education, Treasury, and Health and Human Services. These are not abstract bureaucratic cuts; they are the livelihoods of men and women who have already served their country. Nearly one-third of the federal workforce is composed of veterans, many of them disabled. Now, they face unemployment not because of performance but because of politics.
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Meanwhile, almost unbelievably, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. military will be outsourcing at least part of Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho to the Qatari government. Even some of Trump’s most fervent allies in right-wing media have been aghast at the decision, citing Qatar’s connections to terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks. Many veterans feel betrayed, just as they have been since Trump took office and started gutting their jobs and services earlier this year.
At a time when America’s military families are already under immense strain, the actions the administration has taken since the shutdown began represent something far more dangerous than neglect. They signal a quiet dismantling of the institutions that sustain our all-volunteer force and the post-service opportunities veterans have earned. The mass layoffs of federal employees, the decision to allow a foreign government to operate on U.S. soil, and a shutdown that threatens to withhold pay from active-duty troops all point to one chilling truth: America’s service members and veterans are under assault.
This progression is deeply suggestive of Vladimir Putin’s path to autocratic consolidation in Russia. What took Putin decades to construct — the hollowing out of independent institutions and empowerment of intelligence services, the marginalization or elimination of rivals, the suppression of meaningful civic and economic pluralism, the deployment of private or semiprivate security forces — and what Trump seems to be laying the foundation for amount to rewriting the rules to stay in power indefinitely.
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For Putin, this was a calculated strategy to preserve Russia’s global influence even as its economy contracted to roughly the size of Texas. Over the years, the country’s wealth shifted from the hands of ordinary citizens to a small circle of oligarchs — and ultimately, to Putin himself. Sound familiar?
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Trump and Republicans in Congress could end this shutdown in a second. They won’t because this chaos is by design. We’re watching the very class of public servants who protect our democracy — the only ones capable of stopping a coup against the U.S. Constitution — being dismantled and replaced right before our eyes.
Wake up, America, before it’s too late.
The Shutdown Is Wreaking Havoc on Military Families and Veterans
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