Trump mistakenly thought he could count on "Freedom Caucus" Congress members to vote for his proposals, such as repeal of the Affordable Care Act, new infrastructure programs or even tax reductions for the wealthy.
This inability to count the number of votes in the House, let alone the Senate, makes almost everything a non-starter, apart from Executive Orders declaring holidays and the like. The time limit on CRAs of executive orders of the prior President has now expired so that's history.
Even more daunting, the "Freedom Caucus" is poised to shut down the government rather than agree to a budget anyone else in the Congress finds acceptable - so any budget is going to have to be bi-partisan.
The budget they're actually preparing includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits which even Trump won't sign unless he's willing to ditch the elderly as easily as he has Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon. At some point Paul Ryan or a new House Majority leader will have to prepare a bi-partisan budget to achieve enough votes to pass the House and Senate.
At this point most government workers are resigned to being paid only $1 a day, or not paid, until a budget is finally passed, months or a year from now. Of course they get this back when the deal is signed. If I worked for the government and I wasn't OK with this, I would have left to do something else a long time ago.
I have never accepted clients who don't pay a retainer up-front - not once. I'm not the sort to wait months for clients to pay bills. Some don't feel they have the leverage to ask that so they even do business with builders like Trump who pay only part of what they owe you years later - and often after long litigation. That would never be me, it's a pointless waste of time.
We've run out of other people's Social Security taxes needed to subsidize our low income tax rates.
