Wednesday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Andrew Walworth, Tom Bevan, and Carl Cannon discussed the start of the great government shutdown of 2025, the collapse of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and new details about privacy abuses from the TSA. After that, a look at the gubernatorial election in New Jersey, where the Republican candidate appears to be narrowing the polls with one month to go, as the Democratic candidate is facing scrutiny about her time at the Naval Academy. You can listen to the show weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** First, the group discusses why this government shutdown is different from all others. How long might it last, who will be blamed, and could it lead to permanent staffing cuts in the federal government? “All the Democratic leaders are calling it ‘the Republican shutdown.’ It’s Orwellian,” Cannon marveled. “The Republicans have a bill to keep the government going. Democrats voted against it while bragging that they’re doing this to protect Medicare.” “Most of these people being laid off are Democrats, and a lot of them are not going to get their jobs back,” he added. “The Trump administration is on much firmer ground, it seems to me, if they say: Well, we found out during the shutdown their jobs are not essential, so we’re cutting those jobs. We’re not cutting the people-we’re cutting their jobs.” “But they will get paid,” Walworth noted. “Unless they get fired, they will get paid. And even if they get fired, I imagine they’ll get some sort of severance.” *** In the next segment, around minute 10:30, President Trump still has no nominee to replace the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief he fired in August. With that, on top of the shutdown, Friday’s monthly BLS jobs report will not be published for the first time in decades. “Apparently, with the shutdown, there’s just one lonely dude at BLS,” Tom Bevan commented. “But they’re still enormously influential-even as flawed as they are, people are still making huge policy and economic decisions based on these numbers, which seems just crazy.” “That agency had been turning out crap numbers for years. We suspected they were cooking the books in favor of the Biden administration. But it just turns out they just weren’t very good at determining basic things,” Cannon added. “Maybe the collection methods need to be updated.” Andrew Walworth deadpanned: “We’re running an experiment. We will not have job numbers, and we will see if the country falls apart because this agency that puts out crap numbers is not putting out crap numbers on Friday.” *** Next, starting at minute 15, the Trump administration shut down the TSA’s “Quiet Skies” program, but a Senate investigation has revealed staggering privacy abuses. They discuss Matt Taibbi’s piece in Racket News: “Not Only Tulsi: Three Members of Congress Also Spied On In ‘Quiet Skies’ Program” “It’s a good thing it’s been stopped, but it probably never should have been started,” Bevan explained. “I think there were over a million names on this list at one point… to be profiled and surveilled and watched as if they were terrorists.” “It was a $ 200 million investment. They didn’t catch one terrorist, according to this report,” Walworth added. “Tulsi Gabbard is the poster child for it. She’s a decorated combat veteran and a sitting member of Congress-but when she becomes a critic of the administration, suddenly she’s on this watch list. It’s a cautionary tale,” Cannon said. Bevan concluded: “It just goes to show that the government-if you give them an inch, they will take a mile. They’ll take five, they’ll take 10 miles, and they will keep taking until someone stops them. And we’re right to be skeptical of these programs.” *** And then, starting at minute 22, the group discusses the New Jersey governor’s race getting closer with one month to go. Republican Jack Ciattarelli trails Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill by 4.7 points in the RCP Average, but two new surveys show the contest nearly even — as Sherrill faces personal controversies. “The polls have it close enough that we have to pay attention,” Cannon said. “We had Spencer Kimball, who does Emerson polling, on last week-he didn’t use this word-but he made it sound like it’s maybe a toss-up, maybe within two or three points.” “In our average, you sometimes see herding-polls clustered around the same number,” Bevan explained. “That’s not what we have here. Of four polls in September, one has it tied, another at two points, and two at eight or nine points. So there’s a real variance here. The average is five, but you’ve got two polls that show it really, really close, and you’ve got two polls that show it almost double digits-not that close. So, two of those pollsters are wrong, at least when they took their snapshot. So we’ll see what happens.” “And New Jersey is one of those states that moved pretty heavily in Trump’s direction between 2020 and 2024, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this race is very, very close in the end,” Bevan said. Walworth noted Sherrill is also facing scrutiny over her Naval Academy history: “She was blocked from attending her own graduation because she was involved somehow in this cheating scandal that happened back in 1994-a very big deal at the time that involved 30 or 40 students. And second, two of her own children were admitted to the Naval Academy. That’s a remarkable statistic; that’s very hard to do.” *** Don’t miss an episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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