The congressional leaders couldn’t contain their concern. Essential government services were at risk. Needy children could suffer. Disaster preparedness was under threat.
“You’re talking about women, infants and children who rely upon these supplemental nutrition programs that are now not being funded and being shut down,” Speaker Mike Johnson lamented on the Fox Business Network. “They are affecting FEMA services in the middle of the hurricane season.”
Never mind that Mr. Johnson led Republicans this year in pushing through legislation to slash nutrition assistance programs as part of the party’s marquee tax cut law, or that President Trump has taken an ax to FEMA grants during his first months in office.
In the upside-down political messaging surrounding the shutdown fight, conservative Republicans, usually eager to assail government largess, have transformed themselves into enthusiastic evangelists for federal spending and programs. It is part of a bid by the G.O.P. to maximize the pressure on Democrats, who routinely advocate for government workers and services, to relent in the spending battle.
“It’s our veterans, our military personnel, T.S.A. agents, women, infants and children,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Fox News as he ticked through those dependent on the government for their pay and benefits. “The list just goes on and on.”
There are limits to the Republican shutdown conversion — most notably Mr. Trump himself, who has been positively gleeful about the prospect of using a federal closure to lay off government workers and cut initiatives that Democrats support.
“They are so worried about people being fired,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “They are like, ‘Oh gee, this harm that’s going to happen to all these people’ — as if they haven’t fired tens of thousands of people already.”
Still, top Republicans in Congress and some at the White House are expressing the gravest of concerns for a bureaucracy they usually deride as useless or worse.
“There are a lot of critical things the federal government does,” Vice President JD Vance said at the White House. “Our troops need to get paid. Our air traffic controllers need to make sure that people are flying safely and on time. We need low-income people to be able to access the food services that are provided by the federal government. There are critical things that need to be saved.”
Even Representative Chip Roy, a small-government Republican from Texas, bemoaned reports that U.S. Department of Agriculture employees responsible for overseeing local meatpackers were sent home as nonessential workers, stranding ranchers who depend on them for product labeling.
“Local American beef is as essential as it gets,” Mr. Roy posted on social media.
The turnabout by Republicans who often rip government spending as riddled with waste, fraud and abuse and federal workers as soulless bureaucrats is one difference in the shutdown from previous ones.
In the past, it has typically been Democrats emphasizing the value of federal programs and the harm a shutdown can cause as Republicans shrugged. But as they work to make Democrats pay a price for the shutdown, top members of the G.O.P. are emphasizing all the good that government does.
“The Democrat-demanded shutdown is disrupting critical federal functions and directly undermining the release of timely jobs data,” Representative Tim Walberg, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Education and Work Force Committee, said in a news release.
That is a far cry from Mr. Walberg’s view of the government last spring, when he welcomed the dismantling of the Education Department, saying that he looked forward to getting “the federal government off the backs of students, families, educators, and taxpayers.”
Democrats aren’t buying the newfound Republican appreciation for government.
“It’s likely a Republican talking point,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, said. “But there is a great irony to it in terms of how they’re leaning in to the importance of government services that they’ve just shut down and have repeatedly done so over the past several decades.”
Democrats have so far remained steadfast against Republican demands to back a stopgap spending bill that would reopen the government unless it contains additional money for health care programs, but they are squirming a bit. It is antithetical to their political nature to be in the position of voting against legislation that would get federal workers back on the job.
But they say they must use what limited leverage they have when the Congress and White House are controlled by Republicans to halt an increase in Obamacare health insurance premiums. They are also leery of empowering Mr. Trump when he has already shown that he will spend or not spend appropriated money however he pleases — no matter what Congress says.
Republicans are fully aware of traditional Democratic unease about shutting down the government and believe it will eventually cause them to surrender in the shutdown fight.
“I cannot wait for the next Democrat lunch when they start screaming at each other,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said on the Fox Business Network. “When they start seeing pink slips go out at the E.P.A., at the Department of Labor, at the I.R.S., and suddenly, the bureaucrats that they are entrusting to advance their job-killing agenda are themselves without a job.”
Mr. Cruz was referring to threats by Mr. Trump that he would use the opportunity presented by the shutdown to fire thousands of federal workers in a break with past shutdowns, when workers were temporarily furloughed but brought back and awarded back pay when the shutdown was ended legislatively.
Should it come to mass firings, senior Republicans want the public to know that it will only be done with the greatest of reservations by Russell T. Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget.
“Russ does this reluctantly,” Speaker Johnson told reporters. “He takes no pleasure in this.”
That idea was undercut by some fellow Republicans, with Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, saying on X that Mr. Vought, the architect of some of the most austere administration spending plans, “has been dreaming about — and meticulously preparing for” the opening to pare back the government provided by the shutdown “since puberty.”
Mr. Trump even shared on social media an A.I.-generated music video of Mr. Vought dressed as the Grim Reaper come to unleash his scythe on the federal bureaucracy.
The potential for a suspension of the Women, Infants and Children program has attracted particular attention from Republicans, with Republican leaders regularly mentioning the possibility of funding running out for a popular initiative that provides food and other nutrition assistance to millions of lower-income families.
“They own any lapse in funding for critical food aid programs, just as they own every other negative effect of the shutdown,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said Monday on the Senate floor of the Democrats.
The shutdown isn’t the only recent threat to the program. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and other groups earlier this year condemned the Trump administration’s budget proposal to cut fruit and vegetable benefits under the program and claw back existing funds.
Those proposed changes came after Republicans approved cuts to food stamp programs expected to end other nutrition assistance for millions of Americans as part of the so-called big, beautiful bill.