Is the Shutdown Trump’s Briar Patch?

Remember that very awesome article by a “Senior Trump Official” at the Daily Caller the other day? The one that said:

The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.

Thomas Lifson over at American Thinker has an interesting theory about what Trump might actually be doing with this shutdown besides playing chicken with congressional Democrats over border security and The Wall™.

Has President Trump suckered Democrats and the Deep State into a trap that will enable a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy?  In only five more days of the already “longest government shutdown in history” (25 days and counting, as of today), a heretofore obscure threshold will be reached, enabling permanent layoffs of bureaucrats furloughed 30 days or more.

Lifson references Michael Roberts’ article “Reduction in Force” which states:

When agencies furlough employees for more than 30 calendar days or 22 discontinuous work days, they must use RIF procedures.

In other words, Lifson proposes (and the Senior Trump Official hints) that a shutdown going over 30 days could have been a Bre’r Rabbit play all along, a setup to a win-win scenario. Either Trump gets the victory and Dems agree to fund the wall or after 30 days of furlough and the initiation of RIF procedures, Trump is legally able to bypass normal firing procedures, which we know make it outrageously difficult to remove employees, and begin the work of permanently getting rid of the bloat in the federal government. He also still has the option of declaring a National Emergency and the wall gets built anyway.

Do you think Trump can pull this off? Will he?

Please take the time to give Lifson’s article a click, it is well worth the read.